Last year I joined a book club, which was a great decision because I’ve been exposed to a collection of rich literature that I otherwise would not have come across. Each month I will update you on the different books that we are reading.
What I'm Reading: The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
Author: Isabel Wilkerson
In this nonfiction New York Times bestseller, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson examines the three geographic routes that were commonly used by African Americans leaving the southern states between 1915 and the 1970s.
Outside of what I was taught in school about slavery and Jim Crow laws, I know little about the history of blacks in America prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As I'm reading through The Warmth of Other Suns, I am intrigued by the stories of emigrants who left the south in search of a better life. Here are some highlights:
• For over six decades, six million black southerners left the land of the forefathers and fanned out across the country.
• Many traveled to large cities such as NYC, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, LA, and also smaller towns like Oakland, Milwaukee and Gary.
• Poet Carl Sandburg, who was a well known reporter for a Chicago newspaper during the Great Migration wrote about how these towns acted as a "receiving station and port of refuge".
• Black migrants were more likely to be married, raising children in two parent households & less likely to bear children out of wedlock.
• Compared to northern born blacks, southern migrants had lower levels of unemployment, higher incomes & lower levels of poverty/welfare.
Wilkerson conducted over 1,200 interviews in order to write The Warmth of Other Suns, narrowing in on the story of three southern people who were a part of the Great Migration. I’m only 30 pages in, but I can’t wait to keep reading.
This is one of my favorite excerpts from the book so far:
The actions of the people in this book were both universal and distinctly American. Their migration was a response to an economic and social structure not of their making. They did what humans have done for centuries when life became untenable- what the pilgrims did under the tyranny of British rule, what the Scots-Irish did in Oklahoma when the land turned to dust, what the Irish did when there was nothing to eat, what the European Jews did during the spread of Nazism, what the landless in Russia, Italy, China, and elsewhere did when something better across the ocean called to them. What binds these stories together was the back-against-the-wall, reluctant yet hopeful search for something better, any place but where they were. They did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done.
They left.
As I read this book, I think about my grandmother, whose family traveled from Louisiana to Oklahoma, and my grandmother from Oklahoma to New York, New Jersey and California during the Great Migration. I wonder if her story mirrors the stories of the people Wilkerson wrote about.
Check back for updates or follow along as I read The Warmth of Other Suns.
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