(NONFICTION – History)
The Warmth of Other Suns – The Epic Story of American’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson (Random House, 2011; Vintage; Reprint edition, 2011).
Reviewed by Chuck Dayton
This book relates the story of the migration of millions of African Americans from the south to the northern “receiving centers” (author’s term for large northern cities) in the 20th century following WW I until 1970. As they were able, people fled the Jim Crow (segregated) south in pursuit of safer places to live. Crimes against African Americans in the south often went unpunished. Whites often killed them for no reason, and without fear of punishment. Their hopes were for not only safety, but opportunity to succeed financially.
Wilkerson focuses on the lives of three migrants as a tool for telling this story –Ida Mae Gladney who moved from rural Mississippi to Chicago, George Starling traveling from Florida to New York, and Robert Foster who migrated from Louisiana to Los Angeles where he practiced medicine for many years. The stories of their leaving are harrowing and the stories of their resettled lives unsettling. These three people are very different, yet face some of the same trials and tribulations in the places they chose to settle. The Chicago location was interesting to me. It put in focus how ghetto formation first began and how some of the problems encountered today by the city of Chicago are a direct result of policies restricting where African Americans could live when they first moved to the city.
I was interested in what it meant for “colored people” (author’s term for African Americans mid twentieth century) to cross the line from north to south while riding the train. The book describes colored people having to move to the Jim Crow cars, separate from whites, often involving standing outside in the rain and waiting. White folks never had to leave the train. No commentary in my collection of passenger train books describe what a Jim Crow car was, or speak to segregation on the rails at all.
This is a very readable book, and the author does a good job presenting the information she received from the three people in her extensive interviews with them. There is a thorough explanation of her methodology at the end of the book. I recommend this book because it is so well written, and to me, an eye opener of the trials of African Americans even during my lifetime.
© 2012
