By: Madeline Johnson 

Department of History, University of Texas at San Antonio 

Isabel Wilkerson offers us a Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative history in The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. The Great Migration was the flight of six million African Americans from the South into the North and West over six decades, from the time shortly after World War I to the end of the Civil Rights Movement. Journalist, professor, and daughter of African American migrants who made their way North from Georgia and South Virginia, Wilkerson also won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994. She was the first Black woman to win the category of journalism. It was a portent of her skill as a writer and documenter of social issues only a few years before she sat down to interview the three main characters of The Warmth of Other Suns.  

The core of Wilkerson’s book is the life stories of three African Americans who moved North and West from the segregated South: Ida Mae Brandon Gladney left Mississippi for Chicago in the late 1930s; George Swanson Starling left Florida for New York in the 1940s; and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster left Louisiana for California in the 1950s. Ida Mae, George, and Robert’s stories read like parallel threads of a time-traveling historical novel, interspersed with sections rooted in secondary sources and newspaper accounts providing historical context to their personal journeys. Wilkerson traces their lives from childhood, where abuse they witnessed and experienced in the South fired their young minds with the seeming pipe dream to find a better life elsewhere. She takes us through their adolescence, adulthood, marriages and births of their children into the tortures they underwent at the hands of white Southerners that triggered their final decision to leave the South for good.  

They discover that the North is no fairytale. Though African Americans can exercise voting rights, make more money, and say “yes” instead of “yes, sir” without fear of corporal punishment, they continue to face racism. Whites don’t want them as neighbors, coworkers, union members, friends or partners. Nevertheless, these Dixieland refugees stake their claim and prove themselves better educated on average than even working-class Northern whites, more likely to live in two-parent households, and supporting themselves in greater frequency than Blacks already living in the North.  

Wilkerson points out that the familial stability of Black migrants from the South runs contrary to the popular belief that Southerners ruined Northern cities. While academia has known these demographic details and statistics for some time, Wilkerson hopes her book will vindicate Southern migrants for the wider public. But she neglects to provide an alternative cause of the gangs, prostitution, and drug addiction rampant in Northern cities. She describes this underclass as “the hooded and disheveled descendants of the least able of the migrants” (p. 493). One wonders what Wilkerson has in mind with the phrase “least able.” Perhaps she means to honor the diligence and steady work ethic of migrants who chose an “honest” path. Perhaps she means to provide the perspective of Ida Mae and George’s generation, who have little sympathy for the criminal way of life. Whatever her reasoning, Wilkerson never satisfactorily explains the social evils associated with abject poverty. In a book as lengthy as The Warmth of Other Suns, she could have found room to link systemic oppression, trauma, and crime. She instead implies that gangs and drug addiction stem from laziness and ignorance. Whoever these “least able” migrants are, Wilkerson leaves their stories untold. 

Speaking of trauma and systemic oppression, Wilkerson has no shortage of evidence for these twin evils binding African Americans in the first half of the 20th century. Reminders of white supremacist violence, discrimination, and dominance splatter almost every single one of her first 440 pages. From the drowning and shooting of Black children, the murder of interracial lovers, and KKK robes stashed in a benevolent white employer’s office desk, Wilkerson deluges us with nearly nonstop white-on-Black cruelty. We might ourselves drown if she didn’t sprinkle anecdotes of Black defiance throughout, which bubble up like gasps of air before she drags us back down to the horror of African American life in the segregated South. Some of these resistance stories are humorous: Blacks throw used condoms on the lawn of a newly-built white high school, dribble soft drinks and popcorn on white moviegoers occupying the seats underneath the colored section, and pee in bags of freshly-picked cotton. Other stories lift us up in timid hope: George occasionally pressures his employer into paying Black workers more. But these stories often end in disappointment, as when George discovers his boss’s plan to lynch him for stirring up demands for a raise, and he flees Florida to New York. In this dizzying sway of death, desperation, and possibility that Wilkerson weaves page after page, she engenders within us an echo of the psychological discombobulation plaguing African Americans for centuries. 

In the book’s last section, “Aftermath,” Wilkerson finally releases us from the incessant anguished grip of white hatred. Here, she follows the lives of her three characters from the 1970s onwards. White people fade from center stage, and we get to accompany Ida Mae, George, and Robert in an increasingly desegregated world. They can book rooms in hotels that used to reject them, pose for Thanksgiving photos meant for mainstream magazine ads, and sit wherever they want on the train. Wilkerson literally and metaphorically holds the hands of her aging interviewees as they endure the deaths of relatives and friends, and finally their own. From the beginning to the end of their lives, they carried the South in their cuisine, their accents, and their hearts, and Wilkerson touches our hearts with the remembrance that whatever the color of our skin, we all must face the passing of time and build a better world for those who will be here long after we are gone. 

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Bibliography 

Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Suns : the Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. New York :Vintage Books, 2011.