Whew, I just completed the book, The Warmth of other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson. From the first chapter to the last page, I was captivated by this book. Isabel Wilkerson interviewed thousands of people to chronicle the life experiences of Blacks Americans during the Great Migration. This migration was the largest mass migration in American history. It lasted for 60 years, from 1916-1970. Wilkerson shares a lot of under reported history through the people she interviewed. The book is educational, enlightening, and thought provoking. It focuses on the lives of three individuals who made the daring journey from the unimaginable brutal injustices of the South to the unknown North. To many the North was viewed as the promised land, but was it?
Ida Mae Gladney, George Starling, and Robert Foster are the three people who’s life she followed. All three of them left the south in hopes of a better life in the north. Ida Mae Gladney was a sharecropper and devoted wife from Mississippi and migrated to Chicago in 1937 with husband. Both became blue collar workers. In 1945, George Starling fled for his from Florida and ended up in Harlem; where he endangered his life and family fighting for civil rights. Robert Foster, left Louisiana in 1953 to purse a medical career without prejudice. Wilkerson uses their stories to tell the larger story of how institutionalized racism help lead to the Great Migration of millions of Black Americans. When reading the book you will not want to stop until you find out what ultimately happened to these individuals.
The Warmth of Other Suns became an instant New York Times bestseller upon publication and has reappeared in the list multiple times since its release. It has been named to TIME’s 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the Decade and to The New York Times Magazine’s Best Nonfiction of All Time.
I highly recommend this book. I think it should be a required reading for high school and college students. To help put the magnitude of the Great Migration in context, Michelle Obama, Denzel Washington and Toni Morrison are all products of their ancestors’ daring decisions to uproot their lives in search of something better. In my own family, many of my aunts and uncles migrated from the South to the North in the 1960s. The book is a long read, but well worth it and insightful. If you have read the book, I would love for you to share your comments here.
To purchase a copy, click the link below. You won’t be disappointed!
“https://www.amazon.com/b?_encoding=UTF8&tag=lenellkay-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=87c74fc1dfcd04284a1b61f24384cd19&camp=1789&creative=9325&node=283155”
This book is both educational, enlightening, and thought provoking.