About book Warmth Of Other Suns, The: The Epic Story Of America's Great Migration (2010)
This is one of the most important books I have read in the past 10 years. It describes the great migration of Black Americans from the South to the Northern Cities over several decades, ending in 1970. I grew up in the 1950's and 1960's and lived in many of these cities in the 1970's and 1980's and was surrounded by many of the urban myths of the Black population there. This book disabused me of many of my own misunderstandings of local political and social situations in the super-segregated large cities of the North. I had several of my book clubs read the book and I was not alone in my ignorance of our own recent history. The book runs a little long and could have been more carefully edited, as it can be repetitious in places. However, the main individuals it follows have compelling stories and these keep you reading. Despite this minor complaint of need for editing and shortening, I believe that this book should be required reading in all U.S. high schools. It could lead to better individual understanding of the great divide still seen, particularly in Northern cities, between the Black and other populations. The Great Migration, a decades-long movement of African-Americans from the south to the north, is rarely acknowledged in mainstream cultural history (in the way, say, that the influence of The Baby Boomers is invoked at every opportunity) but it's one of the most important trends of the twentieth century, both impacting the shape of American history and greatly illuminating the American black experience from the dawn of the century to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Isabel Wilkerson's excellent book tells the story through the lens of the experience of three migrants and their families. The selection of subjects is structurally brilliant in itself; they represent a diversity of time, geography, professional aspirations, political engagement, and intersection with major events and cultural markers.I'm recommending this book primarily to white people like myself who consider themselves generally well-educated and informed about the history of race in America. It opened my own eyes to an amazing extent about the insidious tenacity of institutionalized racism, a concept I was sort of aware of in an abstract sense but now feels visceral (and yet certainly mild compared to the experiences of Americans who continue to personally experience the yet-continuing narrative.) I'm emotionally invested in the judicial injustices of the past two years in a way I probably wouldn't have been had I not known these stories.Part of the book's greatness is Wilkerson's ability to communicate BOTH the cultural and economic progress that black Americans have made since 1920 and the injustice embedded even in those successes, let alone horrors like lynchings, abuse, and economic discrimination. She tells the story of racism being perpetrated by BOTH conventional monsters like Sheriff Willis McCall and chimeric and bloodless institutions like urban planning. The narrative of continual civil rights improvement, obstructed by the occasional and dispatchable villain, is a comforting story for mainstream America, but it is far from the whole story. The African-American experience is a bit like famous rabbit/duck illusion, in which one can see the progress that has enabled blacks to occupy the most powerful executive positions over the past decade (for example) but one can also see a constant stream of injustice, two parallel narratives difficult to reconcile or simultaneously acknowledge. Wilkerson's book is amazing in that she is able to show you a picture of uplift and horror and allow you to see both at the same time.
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Regarding the ongoing torturous never-ending conversation on race in our nation, it is one that I, ever since I permanently started residing in California, am terribly ambivalent about participating in. One of the more tested everyday dictums on how to live live, "do not hurt others and do not allow yourself to be hurt by others," often does not seem enough to live in this nation, at least where positioning oneself in relation to the race debate is concerned. The solipsism of this dictum is often challenged. But participating in this conversation at all has often seemed like walking into the middle of a painful debatein which the already congregated there could not care less what you might have to say on the subject.Given my reluctance to wade into the waters, it is a surprise that I not only cracked this book open but ended up holding it in such high regard. The initial reason I took a look at it is that it seemed as if it would address a question I had often asked myself in my work[place regarding the family history of many of my African American colleagues. Many had come from, or had family that had come from, the Southern states. One came from Monroe, LA. Another came from near New Orleans. Alabama. Mississippi. Georia. And so on.The author, an African American (who occasionally speaks personally about her own family's history), explores a great exodus from the south to points north and west that took place over a span of many decades, petering off in the 1970's. She tells her history primarily on the back of the oral biographies of three people. Undoubtedly, many have come to this book out of academic interest. I did out of curiosity but completed it for the wondrous stories, and for, what in the end, is, yes!, a further deepened and further painful perspective on the ongoing conversation about race.
—Nina2345
Excellent telling of the internal migration during the Jim Crow era. The author gives an overview of the life of black people in the south and the differences (both good and bad) after moving to the north. She also gives an in-depth view of the lives of three people who left in different decades and ended up in different northern cities. My only complaint was that there was some repetition - sometimes she would repeat a description of something that was covered in the previous chapter, but hat was a very minor annoyance.
—Sam
The migration is an important read. Many do not realize it lasted 50 years.
—Belle85
