From about 1915 until well past the middle of the 20th century, a great migration occurred of African Americans from the South into the Northeast, the Midwest, the West Coast. In the
Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, Isabel Wilkerson tells the stories of three families and the history that surrounds them during this era.
Wilkerson doesn't lie when she includes "epic" in the subtitle. The stories she tells span most of the century and several generations. She selected three subjects whose family stories are representative of the experiences, tragedies, dreams, and triumphs of countless black families.
George Swanson Starling grew up picking oranges, but went off to college. Unfortunately, his father refused to continue to pay his tuition. He returned to the orange groves and rallied his fellow pickers to demand better pay. That made him a target, so he left Florida, moved to Harlem, and went to work as a railroad porter.
All Ida Mae Brandon Gladney knew was picking cotton with all the other sharecroppers in Mississippi. After her cousin was falsely accused of stealing turkeys and beaten badly for his troubles, Ida Mae and her family settled up with their landlord and headed north. They ultimately settled in Chicago, where she became a pillar of the black community.
Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, like most blacks in Monroe, Louisiana, dreamed of living somewhere else. His father was the principal of the black high school, his mother was a teacher, and his older brother was a doctor, so it made sense that he would get a good education and go to medical school. After serving in the military as a doctor, he wanted to practice medicine somewhere besides their small Louisiana town, so he headed to California. He eventually built a successful practice, primarily serving other black immigrants.
Wilkerson weaves the stories of these three stories together with their families' stories, the stories of other immigrants of the era, and the broader history of black America. Several things stand out. First, the sheer numbers of black people who left the South--millions and millions. Some industries had to shut down for lack of workers. Whites actively tried to keep blacks in the South, patrolling train stations and preventing people from leaving.
In each of these three cases, in New York, the Midwest, and in California, the migrants were disappointed to find that while they may have left Jim Crow behind in the South, his relatives were alive and well in other parts of the country. Hotels, clubs, casinos, restaurants, even whole neighborhoods were off-limits to blacks. White people assumed they were fit only for certain jobs, like hard labor or domestic work. European immigrants who were arriving during this same period were able to blend in eventually because of their complexion, but blacks stood out, no matter how much education they had or how much they acclimated to their new homes.
Wilkerson masterfully conveys the broad sweep of history that the Great Migration represents. Many of the stories she tells sound like ancient history, so foreign do the attitudes toward race seem. Yet some of these immigrants are still alive. In another sense, she helps to point out the ways that racism was woven into the very structure of many of our institutions.
The Warmth of Other Suns will give you an appreciation for all that this generation of black Americans had to overcome, and gratitude for the much more racially harmonious times we live in today.
