Title: The Warmth of Other Suns Author: Isabel Wilkerson
Published: September 7, 2010
Genre(s): Nonfiction
Page Count: 622
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves.
With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career, the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career, which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he often threw exuberant parties.
Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country trips by car and train and their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos, as well as how they changed these cities with southern food, faith, and culture and improved them with discipline, drive, and hard work.
In The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson sets out to document an important yet little-recognized migration that occurred in the 20th century United States. Between 1915 and 1970, some 6 million Black Americans moved from the South to the North or West, feeling Jim Crow and intolerance. With this book, Wilkerson sets out to prove how important this “Great Migration” was upon the culture of the United States, and also how it affected lives of individuals. The author uses 3 “characters”, Ida Mae, George, and Robert/Pershing to illustrate this, but also draws on larger historical context as necessary.
This is certainly a thorough look at the Great Migration, teeming with both statistics and primary source material. The biographical aspect gives things a personal feel, while the meticulous research (Wilkerson says she interviewed over 1500 people before writing this book) allows the author to zoom out and give a more comprehensive view. Altogether, The Warmth of Other Suns is certainly illuminating and informative, which is good. I feel like I’ve learned something.
That being said, I didn’t actually like the personal, narrative-style of the book. I, for myself, would have wanted a more “academic” take on the subject, though I understand that Wilkerson wrote this in response to academia and its misunderstanding of the Great Migration. And it’s not that I didn’t think these individuals’ stories were unimportant or anything; it’s merely that I didn’t care for the format. The constant switching between the three characters’ stories was bothersome, especially because Wilkerson tended to repeat herself—often verbatim—as she alternated between perspectives. Redundancy is probably my biggest complaint about The Warmth of Other Suns. If you gave the fact or detail once, you don’t need to repeat it several times or couch it in a different way. Readers are smart.
Because The Warmth of Other Suns tended to be long-winded and circuitous in reaching its point, I was often less engaged than I would have liked to have been. The topic itself is both interesting and important, and I’m not denying that at all. I found the detail that certain parts of the south saw majority emigration to specific places (Louisianans to California, Mississippians to Detroit/Chicago, Floridians to New York, etc) was interesting, as was the discussion of “supersegregation” that now exists in cities such as Cleveland, Detroit, and St. Louis. Isabel Wilkerson is a thorough researcher and competent writer, and I think this is a book worth reading for a variety of reasons. It just wasn’t, however, a big favorite of mine.
