The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
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In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves. With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career, the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career, which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he often threw exuberant parties.Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country trips by car and train and their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos, as well as how they changed these cities with southern food, faith, and culture and improved them with discipline, drive, and hard work. Both a riveting microcosm and a major assessment, The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an “unrecognized immigration” within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is destined to become a classic.The Barnes & Noble ReviewIn The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson has rendered the most sweeping, most moving record of the Great Migration to date. It is at once history told on a grand scale -- like Taylor Branch's civil rights era trilogy -- and biography written with a quality of empathy perhaps only available to a child of the Migration herself. Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, now Professor of Journalism and Director of Narrative Nonfiction at Boston University, has synthesized a staggering amount of material, comprising 1,200 interviews with migrants conducted over ten years as well as countless archival documents and newspaper reports. She argues that the Great Migration is "the most underreported story of the twentieth century," an historical turning point that would "transform urban America and recast the social and political order of every city it touched."
PART ONE In the Land of the Forefathers 1Leaving 3The Great Migration, 1915-1970 8PART TWO Beginnings 17Ida Mae Brandon Gladney 19The Stirrings of Discontent 36George Swanson Starling 47Robert Joseph Pershing Foster 72A Burdensome Labor 95The Awakening 124Breaking Away 165PART THREE Exodus 181The Appointed Time of Their Coming 183Crossing Over 205PART FOUR The Kinder Mistress 223Chicago 225New York 227Los Angeles 230The Things They Left Behind 238Transplanted in Alien Soil 242Divisions 260To Bend in Strange Winds 285The Other Side of Jordan 302Complications 332The River Keeps Running 351The Prodigals 364Disillusionment 371Revolutions 385The Fullness of the Migration 413PART FIVE Aftermath 433In the Places They Left 435Losses 445More North and West Than South 455Redemption 465And, Perhaps, to Bloom 481The Winter of Their Lives 491The Emancipation of Ida Mae 516Epilogue 527Notes on Methodology 539Afterword 545Acknowledgments 547Notes 555Index 589Permissions Acknowledgments 621
