About book The Warmth Of Other Suns: The Epic Story Of America's Great Migration (2010)
The Great Migration is one of the largest movements of people in human history, and one of the most important events to understand contemporary America. Between 1915 and 1970, 6 million African Americans left the South to seek freedom and economic opportunity in the industrial North. The shift was truly startling. In 1900, 90 percent of America's black population lived in the South. By the end of this incredible movement of people, nearly half lived outside of it.This is a monumental historical process, responsible for completely changing the face of America. Without the Great Migration, America's great urban centers would be nothing like they are today. They was a time were there was an insignificant number of African Americans in New York, Chicago and LA. Now, we cannot imagine these places without them, their culture and their continued struggle. The Great Migration brought us the Harlem Renaissance. The Great Migration brought us Malcolm X. The Great Migration brought us Joe Frazier. The Great Migration brought us jazz, rock and hip hop. For all of these reasons (and countless more), we have to understand this process. It is fundamental to who we are.The reasons they left were obvious. Terrorism and apartheid ruled the South, while the North grew ever more desperate for labor. Combined, these forces made the migration almost inevitable, an almost natural stream of people similar to the millions coming across the Atlantic. Parallels between the two movements abound, and there is a lot to learn by comparing the current state of European and African American communities.To deal with a story of such scope would challenge every author, and Wilkerson does an amazing job of balancing the personal and the historical. The individual experience of the three migration "waves" are told through the stories of three families, all of different class and different geography. Between these biographies, Wilkerson weaves some of the more astounding features of the movement as a whole. The effect is a story both immediate and epic. Intimate and grand.There are a lot of messages to be drawn from this book: but this might be the most important. The Northern ghetto, with its nearly uncountable number of dysfunctions, was an intentional construction. Wilkerson admirably and tirelessly dispels many of the more pernicious myths about the immigrants, showing how they were usually more educated than the Europeans, had more stable families and brought with them strong foundations of church and community. But once they arrived, they were greeted with unprecedented hostility. The riots, bombings and assaults were a constant presence throughout the Migration, and the violence made fleecing easy. The result was an African American community living in the worst conditions in most cities, yet often paying double or triple the rent of other communities. Poverty was the obvious result, and the problems of poverty made it easier to justify the violence and continued exploitation. The cycle continued for a shockingly long time, abetted by national policies like redlining all the way into the 1980s, at least. And the problems of the migration continue to be felt in events like the subprime crisis and mass incarceration. We often want to pretend that some of the most ugly chapters of American History is far behind us, but recent events have brought an increased amount of attention to racial divides existing in America's cities. These divides are not accidents, and it's crucial to see how the ghetto was a weapon wielded at African Americans bold enough to escape Jim Crow. To quote Faulkner, racial politics is one of the most prominent places where "The past is never dead. It's not even past." America has to have this dialogue, and it has to finally begin mending the wounds opened during the Great Migration. The Warmth of Other Suns is one of the best places to start. The stories of the people she focuses on are amazing! The only reason I didn't rate it a 5 is that the historical overview portions that surround those stories are very repetitive. The argument that the great migration was caused more by push factors than pull factors is much more convincing when told through the stories than through the repetition of the point over and over with some statistics.
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A must read, particularly for whites in the northern suburbs.
—MDH
Expansive storytelling at it's very best.
—eleanab
