Tara Lake Atlanta, GA Posted April 10, 2014 www.TaraLake.

com

A Detailed Review of Isabel Wilkersons The Warmth of Others Suns: The Epic Story of Americas Great Migration The Warmth of Other Suns: the Epic story of America's Great migration is an expansive, meticulously researched narrative and oral history of the great migration a period when millions of African Americans left the South and moved northward to take advantage of growing social and employment opportunities in Northern cities. Identifying the time period of this movement from 1915 to 1975, author Isabel Wilkerson weaves a tapestry of personal testimony, primary and secondary resources, literary references, biographical research, and other sources to tell a story spanning the contiguous United States one with roots in antebellum South and with considerable modern-day applications. In a five-part history, each with a specific objective, Wilkerson focuses on the lives of three interviewees: George Starling of Wildwood, Florida; Ida Mae Brandon Gladney of Van Vleet, Mississippi; and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster of Monroe, Louisiana, chronicling the personal and societal pressures urging them northward, and mapping their journeys to Harlem, Chicago, and Los Angeles, respectively. Touching on each of the subjects childhoods, Wilkerson traces their experiences from youth and young adulthood in the 1920s and 1930s through (roughly) the 1990s, exploring the impacts of their decisions to move northward, the social and economic conditions of African Americans in the North and South between 1915 and 1975, the shifting from agricultural to industrial working conditions, the aftermath and circumstances of their migration, and the meaning of these events in the context of what she contends is one of the most critical developments in the Twentieth Century one that forever altered the cultural fabric of the country. According to Wilkerson, some six million black southerners left the land of their forefathers and fanned out across the country It would transform urban America and recast social and political order of

Lake every city it touched1. The authors argument is multifaceted. Primarily, Wilkerson suggests that the movement is a great deal broader than historians have traditionally considered, noting that while scholars

have devoted research to what she terms the earliest phase of the migration, they have generally ignored the broader period and what historian James N. Gregory, quoted by Wilkerson, has referred to as the more massive sequence of migration that began during World War II. Wilkerson moves the bracket of the Great Migration time period to 1975, urging that by this time, nearly half of all black Americans some forty-seven percent would be living outside the South, compared to ten percent when the migration began2. Secondly, Wilkerson suggest that the Great Migration, quite literally, changed the face of the nation, altering racial dynamics, labor practices, individual trajectories, and the cultural character of both Northern cities and Southern states. Wilkerson argues that the language and music of urban America was broadly impacted, as were the lives of the children of the Great Migration, leaders in every field that whose life chances were altered because a parent or grandparent had made the hard decision to leave3. Lastly, Wilkerson argues that the Great Migration was critical because it was the first big step the nations servant class ever took without asking, arguing throughout the text that the movement out of the south was a move of quiet, insistent protest in the face of violent racism, Jim Crow practices, the sharecropping system, and the caste system that prevented and punished upward mobility among African Americans. On the face of the text, The Warmth of Other Suns appears to be based only on oral histories, and this is largely due to the authors gift for colorful storytelling (coupled with a lyrical weaving in of various texts) not often witnessed in historical writing. But a closer examination reveals that the author, a journalist by trade, has closely researched a myriad of facts, including town histories, weather data, family trees, biographical histories of luminaries, copious newspaper accounts, and other documents, reaching as far as the mid-Nineteenth Century, to verify testimony, add historical context and precisely locate geographical locations. In addition to nearly 200 oral history sources, Wilkersons notes reference articles such as The

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! "!Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Others Suns: The Epic Story of Americas Great Migration (New York: Vintage Books, 2010,
2011), 9 Ibid., 13 3 Ibid., 10
2

Lake Negro Problem, published by the Independent in 1902, letters such as Laborers Wanted written to the Southern Cultivator in 1867, recent scholarly texts such as Donald Holleys The Second Great Emancipation: The Mechanical Cotton Picker, Black Migration, and How they Shape the Modern South, published in 2000, and classic

African American literature and poetry, such as Ralph Ellisons Black Boy, originally published in 1945. Added to this eclectic collection are number of sociological, historical, and even psychological studies on the lives and motivations of African American migrants in the North, with publication dates beginning in the 1920s. Spanning well over 500 pages, (and numbering over 600 pages when the notes and index are fully accounted), Wilkersons text is epic indeed, and the considerable research is put to balanced use. The author suggests that the history can be considered three projects in one: an oral history collection, a narrative focused on the lives of three migrants, and a review of Great Migration-focused news articles, scholarly works, and literature. As mentioned earlier in the essay, Wilkerson pursues a three-part argument in The Warmth of Other Suns. In each case, she handily defends her assertions, providing bountiful context and demonstrating the import of the finding. Wilkerson insists that the Great Migration could be accurately said to have spanned the period from 1915 to 1975. By focusing on cities such as New York, New York (and especially the village of Harlem) and Chicago, Illinois, Wilkerson points to documented population growth numbers, for example, as evidence supporting this expanded timeline in cities such as Detroit, Los Angeles, and Chicago. In discussing the Illinois Central Railroads role in the Great Migration, Wilkerson asserts that the line carried so many southern blacks north that Chicago would go from 1.8 percent black at the start of twentieth century to one-third black by the time the flow of people finally started to slow in 1970 (emphasis mine4). In this way, Wilkerson manages to demonstrate the numerical impact of the Great Migration and the importance of a longer span to a full assessment of the impact of the movement. Wilkersons argument that the growing African American presence in Northern cities and the decrease in African American populations in Southern States altered the urban landscape and impacted

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
4

Ibid., 190

Lake Southern relations is addressed in various ways throughout the text. The author notes that some Southern organizations, alarmed by the exit of African American laborers, utilized violence and intimidation before, in some cases, urging a softening approach toward African American laborers in order to lure them back to the South. These organizers sent representatives north to try to bring colored workers back. They offered free train tickets and promised better wages and living conditions5. At least some farmers relinquished violent methods, the authors research suggests. Generally, according to Wilkerson, these attempts failed. In the north, African American groups, such as the Chicago Urban League, and publications such as Chicago

Defender, led efforts to address migrant-related issues. Urban League members went door-to-door, passing out leaflets advising the migrants as to their behavior and comportment, included such commandments as: DO NOT LOAFDO NOT CARRY ON LOUD CONVERSATIONS IN STREET CARS AND PUBLIC PLACES6. Too, Wilkerson lays out, in stark detail, evidence for recognition of the Great Migration as a protest of the oppressive social and economic conditions African Americans suffered under in the Jim Crow South. Each of her protagonists leaves the south in response to racial oppression in one form or another. Starling is forced to leave his home in Florida when his unionizing of farm laborers upsets the status quo and leads local planters to plot a lynching. Gladney follows the lead of her husband, who is galvanized by the near killing of his cousin, a man falsely accused of theft and beaten nearly to death by white landowners. Foster sets out for California when his home state of Louisiana offers him no prospects to pursue his career as a surgeon and bars him from hospital practice. In addition to these accounts, Wilkerson points to numerous lynchings, racist affronts and injustices, and devastating financial strains that imprisoned black southern families. She also offers a damning portrait of sharecropping, the financial and social agricultural system of the South, which enslaved black families and tied them to the land, and of companion systems, including debt peonage. Together, these systems yoked southern blacks in near-slavery, tied them to the land, and left them without recourse when cheated, according to the author: In some parts of the South, a black tenant farmer would be

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
5 6

Ibid., 164 Ibid., 291

Lake

whipped or killed for tying to sell crops without the planters permission7. Speaking up about cheating could lead one to be pistol-whipped, otherwise violently punished, or killed8. Oral accounts bear these dangers out and point to the perils of attempts to leave such circumstances. The author chronicles families and individuals who left southern towns and counties secretly, along with numerous law enforcement efforts to halt escape from southern labor systems. Wilkersons The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of Americas Great Migration, is the work of a master storyteller and historian. Despite its length, the book offers a flowing narrative that captures the three major strains of the Great Migration beautifully, utilizing the stories of one pilgrim traveling the Eastern Coast, one making her way through the American Midwest, and the other heading westward to the California coast. In deft detail, and without glorifying or making martyrs of any of these protagonists, the author allows the reader to consider wrenchingly difficult decisions and circumstances migrating families faced. Each facet of the text, including the oral historians, newspaper tidbits, scholarly context, and local color of each larger section of the book, contributes to a well-constructed, deeply engaging read. Already a classic, the book will certainly find its place among the works of Du Bois and Foner, along with several notable historians who have shed new light on the history of race, labor, and region in America. The text is an extraordinary contribution, one that, thankfully, has found a place among popular readers and one that will likely be considered a seminal text in the study of United States History of the Twentieth Century.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
7 8

Ibid., 53 Ibid., 54