The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration

I learned so much. The Great Migration was so enormous and lasted so long, there is very little of this country that wasn’t affected by it.Unfortunately, the people who left the South for cities in the North haven’t often been seen clearly. As with everything in the US, racial assumptions have been accepted as fact and then programs to address some of the problems facing descendants of the migrants or those who stayed in the South don’t work as planned.Much of the migration was shaped by the passenger rail spread over the country at that time. I hadn’t realized that the migrants from small towns tended to follow other families and friends from the Southern town. There are little “expat” communities in all of the destination cities that sometimes now are larger than the populations remaining in those rural landsI think the most important thing in this study for me was to dispel the myths about who moved and why. I knew about the violence and oppression in the South, but I didn’t know who came north and what they did once here.I believed the migrants had very little education and that the common problems we see in cities where blacks were forced to live were mostly the results of the pathologies they carried to the north.Nope.The reality is that the Great Migration participants had as much, or even more education than people born in the north. Their families were more stable, often included 2 parents and have been able to avoid debt (as of the time this was written). They are active in their communities and don’t wait for someone else to give them solutions.In reality, the people who left the South from the first world War up to 1970 closely resemble typical immigrant families coming from other countries. Their kids are better educated than their northern counterparts. They do not need as much government support as the people who were already in these cities when they arrived. These attributes are similar to those of most immigrant populations.I think I can better able to identify with these families than I expected that I could since learning about these members of the Great Migration’s children.A couple big differences, though. The children of these migrants are not able to blend into the White population like my family’s immigrant generation has. European immigrants could change their names or hide an accent and they looked like the white majority. This group remains visible with very few exceptions.The other was not one I had ever thought about but I should have. Despite the many similarities to immigrant families, the migrants did not accept that label to describe themselves.They objected not only because that isn’t an accurate term. Every one of the many members of the Great Migration generation the author spoke to deeply resented the implications of being called immigrants.The migrants didn’t cross any international borders. Their famies had been Americans since before America existed. While some might have been huddled masses yearning to be free, they were already citizens of the US.Any time the subjects were described as immigrants, it was as if they were stripped of their citizenship they just as happened when they labored to build this country.That insight alone was worth reading this book and there are many more lessons for me about my fellow citizens from this study/book.I found so many ideas for future research. This will be (is already) a foundational book for rural/urban sociology and probably will spur studies in my areas of interest (media studies, agriculture and ag economics) too.Considering the extreme importance of the rural/urban divide in politics, economics and climate research right now, I recommend reading ASAP.

The “Great Migration” of African-Americans is one of the nation’s largest mass migrations of people, but is scarcerly recognized. In part this is because the migrants were African-American (and in most cases, African-American history is an “add-on” to the traditional historical narrative), in part because it was so huge (millons migrated from the South to the inudustrial North or West) and took so long (60 years). Wilkerson does a masterful job of describing this epic movement of people in broad terms, while personalizing the journey through the experiences of 3 migrants: George Swason Starling from Florida, Ida Mae Gladney from Mississippi, Robert Foster from Louisiana. Each arrived at at different destination: Harlem, Chicago, Los Angles, each making a new home for themselves in a different manner, but all three a microcosm of the Great Migration. It is a riveting read.By now, every school child is taught the importance of Brown v. Board (1955), is familiar with the Selma march and speeches of Dr. King, has seen the footage of police dogs and firehoses being turned on children in Montgomery, Alabama. The Jim Crow South was worse than this – much worse – as Wilkerson’s subjects tell us, their stories all too similar in spite of the different places they grew up. Like millions of others, they voted with their feet, hoping to realize the American Dream up North. Wilkerson takes us with them as they move, their voices retelling their journey and arrival, as story that is the fabric of America, a classic immigrant tale.As Ida Mae, Robert and George make their way in the new world Wilkerson, with sensitivity and attention to detail shows us how these migrants changed America, and how the North changed them. As the Civil Rights movement began to grow and become law, the effects of Migration are outlined by Wilkerson, weaving the larger history of the nation through the events and perspectives of her subjects. As the 20th century closes, there is an element of bittersweetness as her now elderly subjects look back at their lives, seeing themselves as ordinary individuals who made solitary decisions, not realizing how remarkable their lives have been, how momentous their actions were, and how they fit into the larger historical tapestry of the nation.This is how history should be written. By tying together the larger issues of history with the intimately personal stories of its participants, the immeadiacy of the event becomes inter-personal, letting readers have a connection with both the subjects of history as well as with the event itself. My highest recommendations.

I’m happy to have experienced this gem. This is one that you will want to read slowly and take in every word. Full review posted on YouTube (The Literary Layer)

This is an important read for the moment we are in now when we are having discussions, often on Facebook, about the long pattern of police killing black people in the streets, reparations, Black Lives Matter, institutional racism, etc. It is the story the North and West absorbing refugees escaping the horrors of the Jim Crow South.It focuses on three common routes of migration from WWI through the mid-1970s and tells the stories of the people involved, often through their own reminiscences. One route takes a sharecropper family from the cotton fields of Mississippi to the South Side of Chicago, another maps an escape by rail from the orchards of central Florida to Harlem, and yet another migration takes pre-Interstate roads from Louisiana to L.A.It’s obvious that Ms. Wilkerson devoted a good chunk of her life in the mid-to-late 90s to visiting and collecting the accounts of the migrants involved, and it’s sad that Ida Mae, George Starling and Robert Foster never got to read the result. It’s a long read, and weaves back and forth through time, and often I found myself looking up events online of which I had no prior knowledge, such as The Groveland Four or the Cicero Riots. It’s also not an easy read emotionally. There were several times it brought me to tears. But I’m thankful that I now have a perspective on a part of U.S. history that I wouldn’t have otherwise.

Initially I thought it would me take a long time to finish it because it’s a thick book….wrong! It is soooo engaging I read it in 4 days ( and I have a busy schedule).I highly recommend everyone read it. Loved it so much that I gave a copy to 5 of my friends.

A friend told me about this book. I immediately went to Amazon and ordered it. I’m soo glad I did. I highly recommend.

This is a magnificent book, well-researched and well-written. It is epic in its scope and riveting in the telling. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Non-Fiction with good reason.The author interviewed over twelve hundred individuals for this book. She then focused on three of those individuals, and it is their stories that provide the backdrop against which the Black diaspora out of the Deep South unfolds. Their lives in Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi were far different from the lives that they would eventually live, once they left the south.The story that the author weaves is a compelling one, painting a horrific way of life for Black Americans in the South under Jim Crow. Before the Diaspora began, the majority of Black Americans lived in the south due to historical and economic constraints. It was simply not so easy to leave for a myriad of reasons. Their leaving the Deep South was a life transforming migration when they did, for them and this country.This book is eminently readable, interesting, and compelling in so many ways. I was simply riveted. It was mind boggling to me the constraints under which so many people lived for so long. This is definitely a must read book!

What a simply wonderful book. Through the authors clearly honed journalistic skills a story of struggle, pain, striving, aspiration, success, joy and loss is told to us about one of Americas most important modern day migrations.Her 15 years of research and inquiry is clearly a labour of love and respect to all those who made the journey “north” and to those who stayed behind. She weaves a tale of humanity with her journalistic pen, clearly held in a loving and relevant hand, to guide us through 55 years of movement of a people, Americans, who had yet to enjoy the full benefits and opportunities of their nation. Americans, who had yet to have their story told. Americans, who moved not just themselves and their families but also their nation and even the world towards greatness and gain.One is lead thru each protagonist along a journey of humanity, at its best, at its worst. She holds no punches when covering the social and economic issues involved, especially for future generations who came after the individuals covered, but she is able to present the facts and argue both “sides” if you will to pressing and at times depressing situations.Read this book if you want to know about America as it was, as it struggled and why and what it has become.Well worthy of all its prizes and accolades this book is a historic gem.

Highly informative, educational, raising insight to what different nationalities shared and what remains today.

I first read the writings of Ms. Wilkerson while a student at Howard University in the early 1980s. At that time she was Editor of the student newspaper, The Hilltop, and I, a member of the Debate Team. I found her writing, even then, to be concise, open minded, probing and stylistic. Even so, I was not prepared for her outstanding work of art realized in “The Warmth of Other Suns”. What Ms. Wilkerson has accomplished will be placed alongside other works of art that at their core describe, portray, examine, question, and clarify the inherent nature of what it means to be an American, in all of its multifaceted manifestations. While reading at times as a great work of Fiction, her due diligence and research with regard to the subject matter, moves it beyond even the insular realm of Non-Fiction, into something with even greater and more profound implications.It is impossible to truly understand the American Experience, unless one can understand the stories of its people and its events, and to transverse and transcend the duplicitous nature of our greater and lesser nationalistic angels. Furthermore, the story, regardless of the protagonists or antagonists, must include elements that are inherent to all who were participants in that experience. “The Warmth of Other Suns” does a masterful job in this regard. Not by pointing fingers, but by pointing out that the American quilt is a patchwork, encompassing many different fibers and many different strands, but in the end, each is necessary to complete the quilt, and each adds its own unique beauty and elegance. To me the mark of a great book is that I cannot put it down, and that I feel saddened when I read the last sentence. This book accomplishes both. I recommend it to any wishing to learn more about the history of not just African Americans, but the history of America overall. And most importantly to those who wish to understand why things are of a certain nature in this country, and the paths and steps that were taken to get to this point. My sincere and heartfelt thanks to Ms. Wilkerson for her work which I am certain will become part of the great American literary and historical tradition.

I’m 85 years old; grew up in the south and I did not know so much of what I learned from this carefully researched book!

Few books in my very long life have impressed me like “The Warmth of Other Suns.” Isabel Wilkerson embodies the talents if a top-flight reporter: she accepts no pat answers, she does exhaustive research, and she lets the facts take her where they will. If she has personal biases, they are invisible in this work.Wilkerson’s reporting skills give the book its spine. Her instinct for language and her faithfulness to the spirit of the three people she closely chronicles give the book its poetry. She writes beautifully. She digs for the truth.This book has changed how I’ve understood a whole host of things: The history of the Black experience in 20th-century America. The forces that can compel a person to leave family and friends for a flight into the unknown. The nature of the resistance in the North to migrating southern Blacks—resistance from both Whites and an existing Black population. Etc., etc.My one regret? I wish this book had been in my hands and heart fifty years ago. My active life was spent as a college teacher in California. My students invited me to any number of Club gatherings, to family celebrations (sometimes with fifty or more members of a family) and to quiet, private dinners. Now I have endless questions I would have liked to ask these people. Many were clearly either migrants themselves or the immediate children of migrants. I have a new perspective on the anxiety one couple expressed over dinner when Black students were joining Black Power groups in the 1960’s. I realize now that they feared a massive White backlash and the stirrings of Jim Crow sentiments in the North and West.I also have questions I would like to have asked my own parents: My father who left North Dakota alone and without looking back to work in the woods of the Northwest in the teens of the 20th century. My Mother’s whole family who came from Kansas in 1905 for the promise of free (if hard-scrabble) land. The places they fled to were far from the Utopias they had envisioned and yet they stayed. White and Black, their children (like me) had access to educations and opportunities the older generations could never achieve. And mostly the children failed to grasp the sacrifice. Sometimes the opportunities were wasted. And yet the migrators stayed!I’m still digesting the implications of this wonderful book and could easily go on beyond what anyone could bear to read. Suffice it to say that it’s a masterful work—a rare case where the adjective “masterful” actually applies. It’s a breath of pure air: human, humane, insightful, honest, empathetic, and—beautiful!

Migrations have occurred throughout human history wherein various peoples have been forced to flee their homes for fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, political opinion, armed conflict, civil war, et al., and where the government has been unwilling or unable to protect them. “The Warmth of Other Suns” by Isabel Wilkerson relates the epic story of America’s `Great Migration’, a rural-to-urban interregional migration during which millions of African Americans fled the oppressive southern `racial caste system’ during 1915-1970, in order to take advantage of job opportunities in the more tolerant northern and western states. Wilkerson’s recreation of the `Great Migration’ is based on in-depth interviews with over one thousand migrants, but is focused on the life experiences of three specific migrants (Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster) chosen, respectively, to represent the three great receiving cities (Chicago, New York City, and Los Angeles) to which they fled. Wilkerson argues that the `Great Migration’ has been a largely unrecognized immigration within America, which is her expressed reason for writing this book.Exodus of African Americans from the South to the West and North -Wilkerson devotes the first two thirds of this book to describing the harsh conditions (e.g., racial caste system, sharecropper system) for blacks in the south and bordering states, the more favorable conditions (e.g., more tolerance, job/educational opportunities) in the northern and western states, and the process of `crossing over’ from the south to the north and west during the Great Migration. Her presentation is both effective and persuasive.* Racial Caste System – Wilkerson describes, in stark terms, the `racial caste system’ which operated mainly in the southern and bordering states from 1877 to the 1970s. This `racial caste system, which was enforced through `Jim Crow’ laws, legalized racial segregation and greatly curtailed the rights of African Americans. The `racial caste system’ was undergirded by real and threatened lynchings (public executions) carried out by mobs. Wilkerson infers that the `racial caste system’ violated American core values and principles (e.g., democracy, individual freedom, fundamental rights, equality and non-discrimination) and was the bane of American society, doing great damage to many people of all persuasions, not just blacks. Wilkerson states, “…Jim Crow had a way of turning everyone against one another, not just white against black or landed against lowly, but poor against poorer and black against black for an extra scrap of privilege….the caste system was a complicated thing that had a way of bringing out the worst in just about all concerned.”* Sharecropping – Wilkerson introduces the reader to `sharecropping’, a farm tenancy system wherein the `croppers’ (mainly blacks) worked the land owned by the `planters’ (whites) in return for a share of the crop (mainly cotton) in lieu of wages. Wilkerson indicates that picking cotton, the primary crop, was a burdensome and backbreaking form of labor. Wilkerson points out that the sharecropping system was open to widespread abuse by the planters because the croppers were commonly uneducated/illiterate, and lacked the protection of existing laws and state authorities. Wilkerson indicates that the sharecropping system enabled the planters (whites) to continue controlling the lives of the blacks who worked their land.* Tolerance and Job/Educational Opportunities in the North and West – Wilkerson points out that the `racial caste system’ and the Jim Crow laws, for the most part, did not apply in the north and west. Wilkerson indicates that migrants were generally able to get jobs; while some obtained work in industries such as railroads, meatpacking, stockyards, or domestic work, others managed to become physicians, legislators, undertakers, or insurance men.Aftermath (post 1970) and Epilogue -Wilkerson devotes most of the remaining pages to analyzing the aftermath of the Great Migration, describing what happened to migrants (and their families) from 1970 to the current day. In the epilogue, which follows, Wilkerson explores various profound questions:* Did the `Great Migration’ achieve the goals of those who willed it?* Were the migrants better off (i.e., gains exceed losses) for having left the south?* Were the overall human/cultural/social/political/economic impacts on the receiving cities in the north and west, and the rural south positive?Wilkerson acknowledges that some social scientist have expressed the view that the answer to the above questions is `no’; however she puts forth powerful and convincing arguments to the contrary. Wilkerson states, “With the benefit of hindsight, the century between Reconstruction and the end of the Great Migration perhaps may be seen as a necessary stage of upheaval. It was a transition from an era when one race owned another, to an era when the dominant class gave up ownership but kept control over the people it once had owned, at all costs, using violence even; to the eventual acceptance of the servant caste into the mainstream”.The Warmth of Other Suns is a brilliant, eye-opening, educational book. Wilkerson’s presentation is both effective and persuasive, and greatly enhanced my understanding of the issues at hand. I would recommend this book to all readers without regard to race, religion, nationality, et al.

Has some interesting approaches to the Immagration out of the deep south. Hard to believe that humans did many of these things to other humans. A MUST read!

What an eye opening narrative. I had never heard of The Great Migration, although it makes sense to be called that. Growing up in the North, I heard the usual “reasons” why Blacks moved North. Were they better off??In some ways yes because they had freedoms they were denied in the South. In some, no as they were still discriminated against in jobs, housing & education. Right now, in the World we live in, it seems as though the Blacks are facing the same issues they did in the South, not lynchings, but discrimination by Police, shootings, riots, etc. It is gettin as scary ry as it was down South before the Migration. I am White but have several Black grandchildren and great grandchildren and I fear for them with the violence we are now experiencing in our lives.I like the way Ms. Wilkerson chose three “immigrants” to profile. All three were from different backgrounds and had different aspirations as to what they wanted to do in the North. While it didnt always happen as they dreamed, all three led more productive lives in the North than they would have in the South. Of particular interest to me is that I live in Milwaukee and my sister lives in Grenada, MS. On occasion when I was visiting, I picked some cotton to take back home. It is as hard as to pick as described in the book. The bolls do not just pop off the bush. The bolls stay attached to a pod which is the blossom that opens to release the cotton. This pod is very hard and has sharp edges. The cotton has to be pulled off of these pods and it is not an easy endeavor. Also, Summer in Mississippi is nearly unbearable with the heat and humidity. In addition, the fields are not shaded in any way. I thank Ms. Wilkerson for opening my eyes.

This book is amazing. It is history but it reads like a novel. It will increase your understanding of the Black experience in America a hundredfold.

Loved this book. I had just finished reading Caste: The Origins Of Our Discontents by Ms. Wilkerson and was so moved by it that I immediately bought this book. Another incredibly well researched and well written book. You get drawn in to the lives of the three people that are focused on. Both this book and Caste should be treasured historical documents and required reading for everyone. Looking forward to future works from Ms. Wilkerson.

Wow. And I mean WOW. What a book. I don’t think I’ve read anything like this before.The Warmth of Other Suns chronicles The Great Migration, a period of time when black citizens fled the American South in favor of northern or western cities. Taking place from 1915 to 1970, this book focuses on the lives of three people: Ida Mae Gladney who left Mississippi to go to Chicago in the 1930’s, George Starling who left Florida in the 1940’s for New York, and Robert Foster who left Louisiana in the 1950’s for California.It’s funny, nineteen years of schooling, four of which I was a history major in college, and I don’t remember every really learning about The Great Migration. Sure we spent a good chunk of time on the Oregon trail, about what happened when the Dust Bowl hit the south. But six million people fleeing persecution from racism in hope for a better life, within our own country? Nope. Not in the curriculum. Which is utterly mind blowing to me.All three of the people in this book led such interesting, unique lives. I think the one that stood out to me the most was Dr. Robert Foster, probably because he migrated to Los Angeles where I was born and raised and hearing about my own city and the hopes, dreams, and disappointments Dr. Foster experienced really struck a cord with me. His whole life, wanting to be a doctor, wanting to be better, but not having the opportunities to really learn and grow in the south just really stuck with me. I’ll forever remember the parts of this book where he was traveling at night and needed a place to sleep but was turned down by every hotel on the way to California. It was just so devastating that no one would help this poor man when he needed it, those people were so cruel without even thinking they were. It completely blew my mind.This book is Wilkerson’s masterpiece, hands down. I loved Caste when I read it earlier this year and I am so glad I picked up this book too. This is the kind of book I wish was worked into the education system more often, make it required reading for high schoolers and college students!

This book is a meticulously researched saga of the Great Migration of African Americans in the Jim Crow South to the West and North. The narrative follows three brave individuals on their journeys. It is a amazing achievement about real heros, packed with raw history.I’m at a loss as to how to write a review worthy of this masterpiece. Ms. Wilkerson’s exemplary storytelling and years of interviews and research and her own history come together to tell this incredible story. She writes about the best and worst of humanity from punishing lynchings to unyielding courage and perseverence of the oppressed.Here are a few of the many passages that stayed with me.”A series of unpredictable events and frustrations led to the decisions of Ida Mae Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Pershing Foster to leave the South for good. Their decisions were separate and distinct from anything in the outside world except that they were joining a road already plied decades before by people as discontented as themselves. A thousand hurts and killed wishes led to a final determination by each fed-up individual on the verge of departure, which, added to millions of others, made up what could be called a migration.””Any migration takes some measure of energy, planning, and forethought. It requires not only the desire for something better but the willingness to act on that desire to achieve it. Thus the people who undertake such a journey are more likely to be either among the better educated of their homes of origin or those most motivated to make it in the New World, researchers have found.””Contrary to modern-day assumptions, for much of the history of the United States—from the Draft Riots of the 1860s to the violence over desegregation a century later—riots were often carried out by disaffected whites against groups perceived as threats to their survival. Thus riots would become to the North what lynchings were to the South, each a display of uncontained rage by put-upon people directed toward the scapegoats of their condition. Nearly every big northern city experienced one or more during the twentieth century. Each outbreak pitted two groups that had more in common with each other than either of them realized. Both sides were made up of rural and small-town people who had traveled far in search of the American Dream, both relegated to the worst jobs by industrialists who pitted one group against the other. Each side was struggling to raise its families in a cold, fast, alien place far from their homelands and looked down upon by the earlier, more sophisticated arrivals. They were essentially the same people except for the color of their skin, and many of them arrived into these anonymous receiving stations at around the same time, one set against the other and unable to see the commonality of their mutual plight.”In the following, Robert Pershing Foster tries to get a hotel room to rest in New Mexico on his long drive to California:”He replayed the rejections in his mind as he drove the few yards to the next motel. Maybe he hadn’t explained himself well enough. Maybe it wasn’t clear how far he had driven. Maybe he should let them know he saw through them, after all those years in the South. He always prepared a script when he spoke to a white person. Now he debated with himself as to what he should say.He didn’t want to make a case of it. He never intended to march over Jim Crow or try to integrate anybody’s motel. He didn’t like being where he wasn’t wanted. And yet here he was, needing something he couldn’t have. He debated whether he should speak his mind, protect himself from rejection, say it before they could say it. He approached the next exchange as if it were a job interview. Years later he would practically refer to it as such. He rehearsed his delivery and tightened his lines. “It would have been opening-night jitters if it was theater,” he would later say.He pulled into the lot. There was nobody out there but him, and he was the only one driving up to get a room. He walked inside. His voice was about to break as he made his case.“I’m looking for a room,” he began. “Now, if it’s your policy not to rent to colored people, let me know now so I don’t keep getting insulted.” A white woman in her fifties stood on the other side of the front desk. She had a kind face, and he found it reassuring. And so he continued.“It’s a shame that they would do a person like this,” he said. “I’m no robber. I’ve got no weapons. I’m not a thief. I’m a medical doctor. I’m a captain that just left Austria, which was Salzburg. And the German Army was just outside of Vienna. If there had been a conflict, I would have been protecting you. I would not do people the way I’ve been treated here.”It was the most he’d gotten to say all night, and so he went on with his delivery more determinedly than before. “I have money to pay for my services,” he said. “Now, if you don’t rent to colored people, let me know so I can go on to California. This is inhuman. I’m a menace to anybody driving. I’m a menace to myself and to the public, driving as tired as I am.”She listened, and she let him make his case. She didn’t talk about mistaken vacancy signs or just-rented rooms. She didn’t cut him off. She listened, and that gave him hope.“One minute, Doctor,” she said, turning and heading toward a back office.His heart raced as he watched her walk to the back. He could see her consulting with a man through the glass window facing the front desk, deciding in that instant his fate and his worth. They discussed it for some time and came out together. The husband did the talking. He had a kind, sad face. Robert held his breath. “We’re from Illinois,” the husband said. “We don’t share the opinion of the people in this area. But if we take you in, the rest of the motel owners will ostracize us. We just can’t do it. I’m sorry.”Wilkerson wrote this about Harlem and the Harlem Renaissance:“The basic collapse of all organized efforts to exclude Negroes from Harlem was the inability of any group to gain total and unified support of all white property owners in the neighborhood,” Osofsky wrote. “Landlords forming associations by blocks had a difficult time keeping people on individual streets united.”The free-spirited individualism of immigrants and newcomers seeking their fortune in the biggest city in the country thus worked to the benefit of colored people needing housing in Harlem. It opened up a place that surely would have remained closed in the straitjacketed culture of the South.By the 1940s, when George Starling arrived, Harlem was a mature and well-established capital of black cultural life, having peaked with the Harlem Renaissance, plunged into Depression after the 1929 stock market crash, climbed back to life during World War II, and, unbeknownst to the thousands still arriving from Florida, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Virginia, not to mention Jamaica and the rest of the Caribbean when George got there, was at that precise moment as rollickingly magical as it was ever likely to be.Seventh Avenue was the Champs-Élysées, a boulevard wide and ready for any excuse for a parade, whether the marches of the minister Father Divine or several thousand Elks in their capes and batons, and, on Sunday afternoons, the singular spectacle called The Stroll. It was where the people who had been laundresses, bellmen, and mill hands in the South dressed up as they saw themselves to be—the men in frock coats and monocles, the women in fox stoles and bonnets with ostrich feathers, the “servants of the rich Park and Fifth Avenue families” wearing “hand-me-downs from their employers,” all meant to evoke startled whispers from the crowd on the sidewalk: “My Gawd, did you see that hat?”Virtually every black luminary was living within blocks of the others in the elevator buildings and lace-curtained brownstones up on Sugar Hill, from Langston Hughes to Thurgood Marshall to Paul Robeson, Duke Ellington, and W. E. B. Du Bois, on and off, to Richard Wright, who had now outgrown even Chicago, and his friend and protégé Ralph Ellison, who actually lived in Washington Heights but said it was close enough to be Harlem and pretty much considered it so.”If I were to approach reading this book again for the first time, I would slow down and savor it. I might expect to read it over a period of several months instead of over a week as I did. There is so much to take in. I rushed it.

I picked this up from library and when I saw how many pages, I was not happy. I thought it would be another boring book with statistics and facts. However, when the library said I had to return the book and I only had 2 days to read it, I picked it up and fell in love with Isabel’s writing. She tells the stories of the three subjects so lovingly, vividly and with such accuracy, that you can’t help but be drawn into the stories. She weaves the stories together magically along with her own families migration stories. I loved this book and I ended up buying it, because it is a MUST HAVE for everyone’s library. She not only examines the stories in great detail, but she gets into the psyche of the characters which humanizes them and makes the story so personal that you can see yourself. I have been moved by this book and I am highly recommending it to all. This story is the story of America and how it came to be. Our cities, our people and can even lend some hand to the discussion of the disintegration of the black family as it stands now. I am troubled by where we are going with our young people and I am convinced that they must be made aware of our history. It is so important. If we continue to fail our young people and the legacy of black Americans somehow seems to fade away, it will be our own fault. I am also very troubled by those who try to romanticize the history of Jim Crow and slavery and tell us that we should get over it. We are now about 2-3 generations out of the Great Migration and many of those who made it are elders now preparing for their transition to the by and by. I am personally taking it upon myself to interview the last remaining member of grandfathers family who may have been a part of the Great Migration from Alabama. I never talked to my grandfather about it when he was alive and now I miss him even more. Get this book you will not be disappointed. Excellent, Excellent. Isabel is a historian who has marked her place in the books. Thank you.

As a grandchild of the Great Migration, I’m among the first generation to be born in the North, my family’s story, just like the story of countless millions, is woven into these pages. It’s a wonderful, beautiful, and sometimes visceral account of ancestors leaving the Old Country in search of something new come hell, high water, or even racial discrimination.

A wonderful look at the great migration and what it looked like for 3 unique people who made the choice to leave the South. I would highly recommend!

This is my March non fiction book for my book club. I was afraid of the length but found it very easy to read. She really delves into the history of the Great Migration telling about 3 different individuals and their stories.

Excellent review of the GreatMigration from the South by African Americans. The storyline covers three decades in 30s, 40s and 50s. Each story is different. I used the book in the classroom asking my students to find the catalysts that caused each of the people profiled to leave everything and start anew. I learned so much in reading this book and using it as a teaching tool.BRH

The epic story that Isabel Wilkerson illuminates was never taught, or even alluded to during my education. Reading this book has been an awakening.

Being a white man, born in 1952 and raised in the north, I am almost ashamed at how unaware I was of the world outside of my comfortable existence. While I was aware of the themes, I somehow thought of them as relegated to a distant time and land, certainly not in my time. Powerfully, The Warmth of Other Suns tells the story of the Great Migration through the lives of three main protagonists, unrelated to each other but connected in the crucible of human experience and striving to over come the challenges of Jim Crow. Their stories are touching and humanize the real story of The Great Migration.I did not choose to read this book because of the current racial and social unrest in America but by happenstance, I could not have picked a better time. I particularly appreciated the author’s choice to provide short interludes of historical information to help provide context as the stories of our three heroes unfold. It brought history to life in a very effective way.I highly recommend this book.

This book wrecked me.The Warmth of Other Suns is nonfiction about the migration of Black southerners into the north and west, and toward freedom. We follow three migrants from the beginning to the end of their lives, and broader facts are distributed throughout, giving this book a personal, memoir feel.The writing is engaging, immersive, conversational, and totally captivating.I thought I knew a lot about this topic. I didn’t. Or I didn’t know the right things, the details. The people. The truth.I learned so much. My emotions were all over the place.This book needs to be mandatory reading in every single American high school. Everyone should read it. Really. Just read it. Because I have few words and way too many feelings.

This is a book about Jim Crow, the conditions under which African Americans lived under from the early 1900s to about 1970. It is eye-opening and should be a must in America’s history for it offers a sweeping perspective of our history. I’m 81 years old and I confess I was not aware of much of this history, in fact I was largely unaware how the Jim Crow laws affected the lives of many fellow Americans. Now that I know, I’m sad.This is the story of three individuals who lived through this era. They are referred to as “colored,” a term the author uses throughout. She does so deliberately because the individuals described themselves as colored. Yes, this is a term that has replaced in our modern vernacular by “people of color”, “black Americans’, and “African Americans.”But the author does not use these terms until towards the end, instead she uses the language that was common in those days. And that is her genius, as a writer she takes the reader into the everyday lives of several individuals, their hopes and dreams, their struggles to achieve, and yes, their efforts to live everyday lives trapped in the world of Jim Crow, the rules and laws and attitudes of their time.As strange as it may seem, everyone was trapped in Jim Crow including white folks. In reverse, however. For they too obeyed the social mores that condemned people with dark skin–colored folks–to a life that couldn’t even qualify as second class.These stories take place mostly in the South, whether people left the South to head North or West and returned to visit family and friends. The author focuses on a little-known facet of American life: the Great Migration. One that is seldom taught in high school history. The Great Migration describes the migration of people to cities in the north, Chicago, Detroit, New York, Cleveland to name a few. It wasn’t easy. It was terrifying for many courageous individuals who made the journey from the South (although it was a land of Jim Crow it was none-the-less familiar to them) to an unknown future that awaited them in the North. But it changed America too.Because of the Great Migration blacks in America came into prominence. The author concludes by recounting the stories of numerous blacks, typically the sons and daughters of the immigrants from the South, who achieved greatness and finally, equality. They were finally able to pursue their ambitions, that was the common denominator. And as the country evolved the term “colored” faded from everyone’s nomenclature to be replaced by the term Black.It is a finely crafted and warm book. It deserves to be read by everyone.

The book arrived quickly and was in far better condition than I expected. Thank you!

I honestly cannot pinpoint a dislike of the writing. Every word that I read, served as enlightenment for me. I walk away with a better understanding of how and why, we as a people, wound up in the locales we’re in to this very day. I’ve heard the term, ( The Great Migration ) all my life. Now I have an understanding of what actually went on.

This book taught me so much about black lives in the 20th century. My knowledge of African American history between Emancipation and the Civil Rights Era was fuzzy. The Warmth of Other Suns helped me appreciate why it wasn’t enough just to emancipate the slaves. That unfair Jim Crow laws in the South and more subtle forms of discrimination in the North kept black people in this country from being truly free. How black people in the North received lower wages and often paid higher rents, and how this disparity in accumulated wealth and assets affects our society even today, leading to inequality and resentment.I loved following the lives of these remarkable migrants. Some of the most memorable passages were George’s getting married to spite his father, Robert not being able to sleep between Houston and California because no one would give him a hotel room, and Ida Mae meeting Barack Obama when he was a brand new state senator. This book will stay with me for a long time.

As a resident of a small town in south Arkansas (Fordyce), I am familiar with the subject of this book, the migration of millions of poor, Black southerners to metropolitan areas in the North, Midwest and West. In fact, there are a number of “Fordyce Clubs” in such places as Milwaukee, Chicago and Las Vegas, populated by residents of those cities who have their roots in Fordyce, a town with a population under 5,000.This book focuses on three specific cases of migration. The first documents the relocation of a sharecropper family in Mississippi to first Milwaukee, then Chicago, during the Depression. The second deals with a central Florida fruit picker, who migrates to Harlem. The final case involves a Black doctor who relocated from Monroe, Louisiana to Los Angeles. These vignettes are highly instructional and captivating. In between these case studies are broader, macro looks at the phenomenon. This aspect of the book is strangely repetitive and far less instructive.I’ve got to believe that more than three individual case studies were available, many of which could have been used to cover much of what was discussed in a far less specific and less impactful way. Nevertheless, I can recommend this book to anyone with an interest in American history.

Typically I like to read political histories, mostly biographies. However, after hearing about the Great Migration and seeing the consistent rave reviews from Ms. Wilkerson I decided to pick this up. Most of my knowledge on the Great Migration is very limited. I was originally looking for something that would be more about statistics, a brief summary of Jim Crow, the reasoning of those that left the South and how communities formed and developed after such a massive migration but what I found was something much richer.This book by Isabel Wilkerson primarily focuses on three specific people who were a part of the Great Migration. All three come from different states, economic background, and settled in different states but through brilliant writing and storytelling their experiences were brought to life that made the history of the Great Migration titillating and powerful in a moving way. This book felt like a political, social, and cultural history. Through the accounts of the three people Ms. Wilkerson covered I gained a new perspective on the history of the South and of those that risked their lives to move to the North.The book is written in a way that keeps you on the edge of your seat at every page. It genuinely felt as if these histories were being told by people that were standing right next to me. As someone that reads 2-3 history books a week, this is some of the best writing and storytelling I’ve ever read. I strongly recommend that everyone read this. It is moving and deserving of all the accolades.

I read this first book by Isabel Wilkerson after having read her second book ‘Caste the origins of our discontents’ and drawn to her writing and story telling. The stories weave through time and place of four real people, as they escape the south during the Jim Crow era and start of the great migration. You feel as if you are on a journey with each of the characters and realize the pain of being out cast through out the best years of their lives until they are no more. There were moments of their migration experiences to the North or the West reminded me of the journey many of us had when migrating to England in the 60’s through to the 80’s. Without such stories one realizes how little we the recent migrants from other parts of the world to America really know if it’s history that hasn’t been systemically white washed preserving only the big historical moments. This is a must read book as it drops the curtain that cloaks the systemic racism that advantaged the privileged. Through such stories one realizes there is a need for America to make reparations for slavery and continued enslavement of people right through Jim Crow era.

The Great Migration of black Americans from the South to America’s North and West was one of the largest mass migrations of humans in history, but it happened over such a long period of time, approximately 60 years, it happened almost imperceptibly. Ms. Wilkerson follows the story of three individuals who made the daring trek from the rural South to the great unknown urban world as stand-ins for the millions who joined them.Ms. Wilkerson is first and foremost a story teller, and while this is a real history book packed with plenty of facts, figures and analysis, the stories are so lively and heartfelt, it makes for enjoyable reading. The tales of life in the Jim Crow South of sharecroppers still in near-bondage to planters, men and women who toiled in cotton fields and orchards barely scraping out a living, are richly drawn. The constant sense of oppression and fear that these people lived daily is palpable. It is appalling to learn of the daily humiliations and commonplace violence visited upon blacks in the South, and though to a much lesser degree, in the new places they made home.But this is not a sad or angry book. It’s not a polemic. It’s like shared family stories handed down over generations. My mother in law was a black woman who migrated from West Virginia to New York in the early ’40s, and she just never shared her stories with my wife. Surely, some of them were too painful. This books opens up those mysteries a bit.The best thing a piece of history can do for us is help us better understand the world we live in now, and that is what this magnificent book does for us. We learn much about black Southern folkways and can see these strands running through contemporary American black culture.This is a story told by a woman who loves and understands her people, and she invites the reader in to join her in understanding and love.Wonderful!

I have thoroughly enjoyed this books. I am almost finished with it. I learned a few new things such as how rent prices 3-4 times higher for the migrants vs white people. I also found it crazy how little black teachers were paid compared to the teachers at the white school. I have grandparents that have talked with me about the horrors of Jim Crow. And it can be heart breaking to hear their stories. i enjoyed following the lives of the 3 main people of the book. Ida Mae was my favorite. I felt really bad for George and how spite caused him a lot of pain over a life time. And Robert I found him interesting as well. This book also reminded me about how there was slavery in the north as well. I disliked how the migrants were treated not only but white people but black ones too. This books speaks of triumphs and failures and holds nothing back. I think people of all races should read this book. I am looking foward to reading Caste once I have finished.

Should be required reading in High Schools. I’m amazed, appalled, ashamed, heartbroken.But I’m so glad I bought it and read it. It left a permanent lump in my throat.

“The Warmth of Other Suns” is subtitled “The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.” Epic it certainly is, but it is an accessible epic focused on the lives of three real, ordinary southern African-Americans who decided they had had enough. So they left. Isabel Wilkerson, using her journalist’s eye and ear for the telling detail, takes us along on their journey from the South and beyond, enabling the reader to:* Ride in the car from Louisiana in the 1950’s with an exhausted Dr. Robert Foster in the dead of night on his futile search for lodging in motels in the supposedly more enlightened western states enroute to Los Angeles;* Stand on the train in the mid-1960’s with George Starling, who escaped an oppressive Florida farm labor system to become a railroad porter, as he faces the ethical dilemma — and the possible loss of his livelihood and life — of whether to tell southbound black passengers who had boarded the train in the north that, contrary to the conductor’s wishes, they could decline to move to the customary Jim Crow car even after the train left the nation’s capital because a new federal Civil Rights Law gave them the right to sit where they pleased;* Sit with Ida Mae Gladney in the living room of her second-floor Chicago apartment in the mid-1990’s as she watches the depressing drama outside her window of a few members of a later generation abusing a freedom they take for granted but that she achieved only by leaving Mississippi, at some peril to herself and her family, in the 1930’s.Despite the author’s obvious, though not unqualified, affection for these and other migrants, her writing is uncommonly beautiful without ever being precious. For example: “These are the stories of the forgotten, aggrieved, wishful generations between the Harlem Renaissance and the civil rights movement, whose private ambition for something better made a way for those who followed.” Gorgeous.The book also provides solid sociological analysis of the Great Migration. But it is in the unfolding lives of these three people and those whose lives they touch that the real lessons of the era are conveyed. I found myself earnestly hoping that all of the episodes the author describes in these lives would turn out well. But the episodes do not all have happy endings. Life doesn’t work that way. Notwithstanding the elegant artistry of the writing, this, I kept reminding myself, was a work of non-fiction.And the journey goes on. On January 10, 2011, as I was nearing the end of the book, I read an article in the front section of the Wall Street Journal headlined “South Draws U.S. Blacks”: “The nation’s African-American population continued its southward migration over the past decade, shifting a large part of the black middle class to the faster-growing economies of the South. Among 25 big metro areas with the largest growth in African-American population between 2000 and 2009, 16 were in the South . . . . All this is the slow unwinding of the so-called Great Migration, the 20th-century movement of blacks from the South to the growing industrial cities of the East Coast, Midwest, and West.”But this latter day migration, like the previous one, is not impelled by some “grass is always greener” delusion. Like the former migration, this migration is driven by the purposeful pursuit of the basic yearnings of all Americans. In the earlier trek, the pursuit was of dignity and meaningful freedom. A woman who moved from Princeton, New Jersey to New Orleans identified the forces now at work crisply: “‘We can save, we can travel and we can get out of debt,’ she says of the lower taxes and cost of living in her new state.”When I finished this book, I found myself wanting to meet the three people on which it centered. But on reflection, I realize that I did meet them. I met them in the same profound way I have met Tom Joad and Daisy Buchanan and Louis Brandeis and John Marshall and a number of other people whose real or fictitious life stories have been told by the right storytellers. Such stories have stayed with me and, as with these stories, enrich my own life journey.

If you have a difficult time finding a copy of this book, blame me. I have been telling everyone I know about it and one well-placed friend is buying hundreds of copies to share with friends in Africa who are perplexed by the predicament so many Black Americans find themselves in to this day.The Warmth of Other Suns paints the picture as compellingly and completely as anything I’ve ever seen or read. As the stories of desperation, ambition and flight unfold, the reader can see just how many ways the American Dream was yanked away, hidden or otherwise made inaccessible to one generation after another. George, for example, could have been so much more than a railroad porter. He wanted to be more. He TRIED to be more. He even went to college at a time when that was all but unheard of for a young black man from the citrus belt of Florida. Danger and deprivation robbed him of that opportunity and all of the possibilities that would have come with it. Instead, he ended up an overworked denizen of substandard housing, with broken knees and bad kidneys from all the years of picking oranges and tangerines then stacking and unloading luggage on railroad runs along the eastern seaboard. Meanwhile, his New York-born-and-raised children — not privy to the “village” atmosphere of family and child-rearing of George’s native Southland — were left to fend for themselves in the impersonal, take-a-number concrete jungle of an overpopulated city and, with limited options, spent their energies on getting into, or ducking, trouble. The reader can just see the State of Black America take shape.This is an absolute masterpiece by a virtuoso writer. As I neared the end of it, I got the blues, knowing how much I would miss reading it. So, I did what any right-thinking person would do: I read it again.Please do yourself a huge favor and read this. It is, simply, amazing.-Deborah Mathis

good

This book is far beyond a simple tale of struggle and dreams not realized. The 3 featured subjects told a story, meticulously researched and validated by personal accounts, of the harrowing experiences prior to, during and after the amazing journeys to the North where hopes were eventually replaced by more suffering and condescension. The dedication by Isabelle Wilkerson to create this authentic narrative is beyond courageous. She met with those whose lives this book describes. She road and personally transported them to and from places of their past for the collective reasons explained in detail.Though this is a large book which will require a significant commitment of time to read or even to listen to audibly, it is worth every moment of the time you are so fortunate to have.

If you liked fiction “Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck about the migration during Dust Bowl, you will find this non-fiction book about the biggest migration in history that most of us don’t know.This is a haunting history of 6 million African-Americans fleeing the Jim Crow era South to Northern cities. The book is organized as a story of three families migrating to New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. The author has interviewed thousands of people and has done extensive research on this less known Mass Migration within our own borders. The author has a great gift of writing the details for us the readers. Some details of lynching are unnerving and left me with no sympathies for the White people of Southern States. Even to this day they fly the confederate flags! The book is very long, 538 pages plus Notes, Index etc add up to 622 pages.Last few chapters of 1990 decade were less interesting compared to earlier decades.Only other comment I have is that even though this is a history book, it has no historical photos of any major characters or events. I hope a future edition corrects it.

This is a magisterially written Epic story which I knew about generally. As an 82 year old White woman who grew up in New York City and who because of various life experience already as a girl knew Blacks and Whites from the South already in the 1950s as well as Native American Indians, I thought myself fairly knowledgeable about the horrors of Jim Crow. I never realized fully just how systemic it was, how economically based, how designed to crush the soul of Black people. What is a total wonder to me is that so many have come out of it without hating every single White person in America. Many Blacks are far more generous than I fear I would be capable of being had I been subjected to what their parents and grandparents had been and far more traumatized than many seemingly are. Without empathy humans are doomed. Without a proud sense of justice humans are doomed. Knowledge is the first step to both and this book is an incomparable beginning in a time that Blacks still seem to be freely killed by police in Northern cities. Just yesterday the police in Kenosha shot a man who was getting into his car and did not stop when told o do so. The police knew where the man lived. The car was parked in front of his house. They had the license plate. The sense of impunity, the a White police man has the “right” to shoot a defenseless, unarmed Black man simply because he refused to “obey” is beyond the ability of words to express my continuing sense of outrage.

Excellent book. I would recommend it to all readers. Anyone who has lineage that goes back to slavery in the United States it is a must read. Explains in detail the various migrations from the plantation fields of the south to the north, west, midwest, and northeast and how ADOS/FBA got there and why they made those journeys.

Though it is not a fiction book but rather the outcome of a deep and comprehensive research as to the African – Americans’ big migration into the North during the course of most of the last century, the book is read as a thriller and a page turner. The author has the talent to describe even regular, day to day activities in an exciting and intriguing way, sticking you to the book until the very last page. It was an eye opener for me as i knew very little about the AAs’ life in the sout after the end of the CIvil War. After readin “Roots” i was under the wrong imptession that once the Civil War ended AAs have gained their freedom and equality in the South. A book i read a short while ago “Slavery, a Different Word” showed me how wrong this perception was. This book completes the missing part in my understanding of AAs’ destiny after the Civil War and mainly durin the Jim Crow times and the brutal and devastating cruelty imposed on them which shaped the AAs’ geographical ptesence of these days. The author has done a fantastic job in describing both tha AAs’ communities’ history and the petsonal stories which are the core ofcthis book. The stories are sometimes very frustrating and outrageous as has been the life of AAs in the south during these dark times. Still though the main characters of the book are presented with so much love, sincere and humanism that you can’t avoid but feeling so much empathy and identification with these great people. This is a must read for anybody seeking to understand better the causes for some of the challenges affecting AAs life nowadays.