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Isabel Wilkerson

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration Hardcover – September 7, 2010

by Isabel Wilkerson (Author)

16,136 ratings

Goodreads Choice Award nominee

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NATIONAL BEST SELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • NAMED ONE OF TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE AND ONE OF BUZZFEED’S BEST BOOKS OF THE DECADE

“A brilliant and stirring epic . . . Ms. Wilkerson does for the Great Migration what John Steinbeck did for the Okies in his fiction masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath; she humanizes history, giving it emotional and psychological depth.”—John Stauffer, The Wall Street Journal

NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times •USA Today • O: The Oprah Magazine • Publishers Weekly • Salon • Newsday •The Daily Beast

In this beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. 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. Both a riveting microcosm and a major assessment, The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an “unrecognized immigration” within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is destined to become a classic.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker • The Washington Post • The Economist • Boston Globe • San Francisco Chronicle • Chicago Tribune • Entertainment Weekly • Philadelphia Inquirer • The Guardian • The Seattle Times • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Christian Science Monitor

Print length

640 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Random House
Publication date

September 7, 2010
Dimensions

6.4 x 1.5 x 9.55 inches
ISBN-10

0679444327
ISBN-13

978-0679444329
Lexile measure

1160L
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Over the course of six decades, some six million black southerners left the land of their forefathers and fanned out across the country for an uncertain existence in nearly every other corner of America.
Highlighted by 5,475 Kindle readers
In 1896, in the seminal case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court sided with the South and ruled, in an eight-to-one vote, that “equal but separate” accommodations were constitutional. That ruling would stand for the next sixty years.
Highlighted by 4,351 Kindle readers
And more than that, it was the first big step the nation’s servant class ever took without asking.
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a sharecropper's wife, left Mississippi for Milwaukee in 1937, after her cousin was falsely accused of stealing a white man's turkeys and was almost beaten to death. In 1945, George Swanson Starling, a citrus picker, fled Florida for Harlem after learning of the grove owners' plans to give him a "necktie party" (a lynching). Robert Joseph Pershing Foster made his trek from Louisiana to California in 1953, embittered by "the absurdity that he was doing surgery for the United States Army and couldn't operate in his own home town." Anchored to these three stories is Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Wilkerson's magnificent, extensively researched study of the "great migration," the exodus of six million black Southerners out of the terror of Jim Crow to an "uncertain existence" in the North and Midwest. Wilkerson deftly incorporates sociological and historical studies into the novelistic narratives of Gladney, Starling, and Pershing settling in new lands, building anew, and often finding that they have not left racism behind. The drama, poignancy, and romance of a classic immigrant saga pervade this book, hold the reader in its grasp, and resonate long after the reading is done.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine

In The Warmth of Other Suns Wilkerson has composed a masterpiece of narrative journalism on a subject vital to our national identity, as compelling as it is heartbreaking and hopeful. Critics, however, were less certain about whether Wilkerson has written a definitive history of the Great Migration. Several reviewers saw the book as an important corrective to previous scholarship on the Migration that too often grouped African Americans into a voiceless mass, that focused exclusively on the negative consequences of their move to Northern urban centers, and that often emphasized economic and sociological explanations at the expense of the personal. Other critics felt that Wilkerson could have taken advantage of more of this scholarship, even if it was sometimes flawed, and could have taken into account larger structural influences. But The Warmth of Other Suns is an impressive achievement--a fresh, rich look at an important chapter in American history.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* From the early twentieth century through its midpoint, some six million black southerners relocated themselves, their labor, and their lives, to the North, changing the course of civil, social, and economic life in the U.S. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Wilkerson offers a broad and penetrating look at the Great Migration, a movement without leaders or precedent. Drawing on interviews and archival research, Wilkerson focuses on three individuals with varying reasons for leaving the South—the relentless poverty of sharecropping with few other opportunities, escalating racial violence, and greater social and economic prospects in the North. She traces their particular life stories, the sometimes furtive leave-takings; the uncertainties they faced in Chicago, New York, and L.A.; and the excitement and longing for freer, more prosperous lives. She contrasts their hopes and aspirations with the realities of life in northern cities when the jobs eventually evaporated from the inner cities and new challenges arose. Wilkerson intersperses historical detail of the broader movement and the sparks that set off the civil rights era; challenging racial restrictions in the North and South; and the changing dynamics of race, class, geography, politics, and economics. A sweeping and stunning look at a watershed event in U.S. history. --Vanessa Bush

Review

“A landmark piece of nonfiction . . . [Isabel Wilkerson’s] closeness with, and profound affection for, her subjects reflect her deep immersion in their stories and allow the reader to share that connection.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times

“A brilliant and stirring epic, the first book to cover the full half-century of the Great Migration . . . Wilkerson combines impressive research . . . with great narrative and literary power. Ms. Wilkerson does for the Great Migration what John Steinbeck did for the Okies in his fiction masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath; she humanizes history, giving it emotional and psychological depth.”—John Stauffer, The Wall Street Journal

“[A] massive and masterly account of the Great Migration . . . a narrative epic rigorous enough to impress all but the crankiest of scholars, yet so immensely readable as to land the author a future place on Oprah’s couch.”—David Oshinsky, The New York Times Book Review

“[A] deeply affecting, finely crafted and heroic book . . . This is narrative nonfiction, lyrical and tragic and fatalist. The story exposes; the story moves; the story ends. What Wilkerson urges, finally, isn’t argument at all; it’s compassion. Hush, and listen.”—Jill Lepore, The New Yorker

“Told in a voice that echoes the magic cadences of Toni Morrison or the folk wisdom of Zora Neale Hurston’s collected oral histories, Wilkerson’s book pulls not just the expanse of the migration into focus but its overall impact on politics, literature, music, sports—in the nation and the world.”—Lynell George, Los Angeles Times

“[An] extraordinary and evocative work.”—The Washington Post

“Mesmerizing.”—Chicago Tribune

“Scholarly but very readable, this book, for all its rigor, is so absorbing, it should come with a caveat: Pick it up only when you can lose yourself entirely.”—O: The Oprah Magazine

"[An] indelible and compulsively readable portrait of race, class, and politics in twentieth-century America. History is rarely distilled so finely.”—Entertainment Weekly

“Astonishing . . . Isabel Wilkerson delivers! . . . With the precision of a surgeon, Wilkerson illuminates the stories of bold, faceless African-Americans who transformed cities and industries with their hard work and determination to provide their children with better lives.”—Essence

“Profound, necessary and an absolute delight to read.”—Toni Morrison

“A sweeping and yet deeply personal tale of America’s hidden twenteith-century history. This is an epic for all Americans who want to understand the making of our modern nation.”—Tom Brokaw

“A seminal work of narrative nonfiction . . . You will never forget these people.”—Gay Talese

“This book will be long remembered, and savored.”—Jon Meacham

“A masterful narrative of the rich wisdom and deep courage of a great people. Don’t miss it!”—Cornel West

About the Author

Isabel Wilkerson won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for her reporting as Chicago bureau chief of The New York Times. The award made her the first black woman in the history of American journalism to win a Pulitzer Prize and the first African American to win for individual reporting. She won the George Polk Award for her coverage of the Midwest and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for her research into the Great Migration. She has lectured on narrative writing at the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University and has served as Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University and as the James M. Cox Jr. Professor of Journalism at Emory University. She is currently Professor of Journalism and Director of Narrative Nonfiction at Boston University. During the Great Migration, her parents journeyed from Georgia and southern Virginia to Washington, D.C., where she was born and reared. This is her first book.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

In the Land of the Forefathers

Our mattresses were made

of corn shucks

and soft gray Spanish moss

that hung from the trees. . . .

From the swamps

we got soup turtles

and baby alligators

and from the woods

we got raccoon,

rabbit and possum.

—Mahalia Jackson, Movin’ On Up

Leaving

This land is first and foremost

his handiwork.

It was he who brought order

out of primeval wilderness . . .

Wherever one looks in this land,

whatever one sees that is the work of man,

was erected by the toiling

straining bodies of blacks.

—David L. Cohn, God Shakes Creation

They fly from the land that bore them.

—W. H. Stillwell

1

Chickasaw County, Mississippi, Late October 1937

ida mae brandon gladney

the night clouds were closing in on the salt licks east of the oxbow lakes along the folds in the earth beyond the Yalobusha River. The cotton was at last cleared from the field. Ida Mae tried now to get the children ready and to gather the clothes and quilts and somehow keep her mind off the churning within her. She had sold off the turkeys and doled out in secret the old stools, the wash pots, the tin tub, the bed pallets. Her husband was settling with Mr. Edd over the worth of a year’s labor, and she did not know what would come of it. None of them had been on a train before—not unless you counted the clattering local from Bacon Switch to Okolona, where, “by the time you sit down, you there,” as Ida Mae put it. None of them had been out of Mississippi. Or Chickasaw County, for that matter.

There was no explaining to little James and Velma the stuffed bags and chaos and all that was at stake or why they had to put on their shoes and not cry and bring undue attention from anyone who might happen to see them leaving. Things had to look normal, like any other time they might ride into town, which was rare enough to begin with.

Velma was six. She sat with her ankles crossed and three braids in her hair and did what she was told. James was too little to understand. He was three. He was upset at the commotion. Hold still now, James. Lemme put your shoes on, Ida Mae told him. James wriggled and kicked. He did not like shoes. He ran free in the field. What were these things? He did not like them on his feet. So Ida Mae let him go barefoot.

Miss Theenie stood watching. One by one, her children had left her and gone up north. Sam and Cleve to Ohio. Josie to Syracuse. Irene to Milwaukee. Now the man Miss Theenie had tried to keep Ida Mae from marrying in the first place was taking her away, too. Miss Theenie had no choice but to accept it and let Ida Mae and the grandchildren go for good. Miss Theenie drew them close to her, as she always did whenever anyone was leaving. She had them bow their heads. She whispered a prayer that her daughter and her daughter’s family be protected on the long journey ahead in the Jim Crow car.

“May the Lord be the first in the car,” she prayed, “and the last out.”

When the time had come, Ida Mae and little James and Velma and all that they could carry were loaded into a brother-in-law’s truck, and the three of them went to meet Ida Mae’s husband at the train depot in Okolona for the night ride out of the bottomland.

2

Wildwood, Florida, April 14, 1945

george swanson starling

a man named roscoe colton gave Lil George Starling a ride in his pickup truck to the train station in Wildwood through the fruit-bearing scrubland of central Florida. And Schoolboy, as the toothless orange pickers mockingly called him, boarded the Silver Meteor pointing north.

A railing divided the stairs onto the train, one side of the railing for white passengers, the other for colored, so the soles of their shoes would not touch the same stair. He boarded on the colored side of the railing, a final reminder from the place of his birth of the absurdity of the world he was leaving.

He was getting out alive. So he didn’t let it bother him. “I got on the car where they told me to get on,” he said years later.

He hadn’t had time to bid farewell to everyone he wanted to. He stopped to say good-bye to Rachel Jackson, who owned a little café up on what they called the Avenue and the few others he could safely get to in the little time he had. He figured everybody in Egypt town, the colored section of Eustis, probably knew he was leaving before he had climbed onto the train, small as the town was and as much as people talked.

It was a clear afternoon in the middle of April. He folded his tall frame into the hard surface of the seat, his knees knocking against the seat back in front of him. He was packed into the Jim Crow car, where the railroad stored the luggage, when the train pulled away at last. He was on the run, and he wouldn’t rest easy until he was out of range of Lake County, beyond the reach of the grove owners whose invisible laws he had broken.

The train rumbled past the forest of citrus trees that he had climbed since he was a boy and that he had tried to wrestle some dignity out of and, for a time, had. They could have their trees. He wasn’t going to lose his life over them. He had come close enough as it was.

He had lived up to his family’s accidental surname. Starling. Distant cousin to the mockingbird. He had spoken up about what he had seen in the world he was born into, like the starling that sang Mozart’s own music back to him or the starling out of Shakespeare that tormented the king by speaking the name of Mortimer. Only, George was paying the price for tormenting the ruling class that owned the citrus groves. There was no place in the Jim Crow South for a colored starling like him.

He didn’t know what he would do once he got to New York or what his life would be. He didn’t know how long it would take before he could send for Inez. His wife was mad right now, but she’d get over it once he got her there. At least that’s what he told himself. He turned his face to the North and sat with his back to Florida.

Leaving as he did, he figured he would never set foot in Eustis again for as long as he lived. And as he settled in for the twenty-three-hour train ride up the coast of the Atlantic, he had no desire to have anything to do with the town he grew up in, the state of Florida, or the South as a whole, for that matter.

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House; Later prt. edition (September 7, 2010)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 640 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0679444327
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0679444329
Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1160L
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.21 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.4 x 1.5 x 9.55 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #40,703 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #22 in U.S. Immigrant History
- #34 in Emigration & Immigration Studies (Books)
- #98 in Black & African American History (Books)

Customer Reviews:
16,136 ratings

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Isabel Wilkerson

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Isabel Wilkerson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, is the author the critically acclaimed New York Times bestsellers The Warmth of Other Suns, and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.

Her first book, The Warmth of Other Suns, tells the story of the Great Migration, a watershed in American history. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Heartland Prize for Nonfiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Award for Nonfiction, the Lynton History Prize from Harvard and Columbia universities, the Stephen Ambrose Oral History Prize and was shortlisted for both the Pen-Galbraith Literary Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

WARMTH was named to more than 30 Best of the Year lists, including The New York Times' 10 Best Books of the Year, Amazon's 5 Best Books of the Year and Best of the Year lists in The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and The Economist, among others. In 2019, TIME Magazine named Warmth to its list of the10 best books of the decade.

Her second book, CASTE: The Origins of Our Discontents, explores the unrecognized hierarchy in America, its history and its consequences. Caste became a No. 1 New York Times bestseller, was the 2020 summer/fall selection for Oprah’s Book Club and was longlisted for the National Book Award. It was named to more best of the year lists than any other work of nonfiction. TIME named it the No. 1 nonfiction book of 2020. Publishers Marketplace named it the book of the year across all genres. In 2021, it was the most borrowed nonfiction library book in the United States, according to Quartz Magazine.

Wilkerson won the Pulitzer Prize for her work as Chicago Bureau Chief of The New York Times in 1994, making her the first black woman in the history of American journalism to win a Pulitzer and the first African-American to win for individual reporting. In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded her the National Humanities Medal for "championing the stories of an unsung history."

She has appeared on national programs such as "Fresh Air with Terry Gross," CBS's "60 Minutes," NBC's "Nightly News," "The PBS News Hour," MSNBC's "The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell," “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah,” NPR's "On Being with Krista Tippett," the BBC and others. She has taught at Princeton, Emory and Boston universities and has lectured at more than 200 other colleges and universities across the U.S. and in Europe and Asia.

Follow @isabelwilkerson on Instagram and Twitter. Follow her on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/IsabelWilkersonWriter/

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Clem

History can be ugly

Reviewed in the United States on August 10, 2019

Verified Purchase

“Let us not fool ourselves, we are far from the Promised Land, both north and south.” – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The Warmth of Other Suns is a book that I think should be mandatory that every white person residing in the United States between the ages of 9 and 90 read. I don’t mean that in a harsh way. When one looks at the many accusations of racism as we approach the second decade of the twentieth century, it’s too easy for most white Americans to think that there isn’t a problem with racism in our country anymore, and the problems that we had were taken care of many years ago. I would guess 99% of African Americans would strongly disagree. Most would probably argue that whereas there have been great strides in the last half-century, there are still many more problems, and we have a long long way to go before there is any sort of racial equality.

Whereas this book is definitely about the ‘past’, the feeling that one comes away with is that the past was so harsh and brutal for people of color, and the obstacles so insurmountable, that it’s simply impossible to think that things such as a Civil Rights Bill and Affirmative Action can remotely begin to heal the many misdeeds and scars. When one and one’s family have lived in oppression for hundreds of years, a much more concerted effort by all is needed to make the many wrongs right.

This book essentially tells the story of three black Americans that were born in the Jim Crow South in the early parts of the twentieth century where racism is considered normal and slavery has really been abolished in name only. This was a time and a place so violent that an ignorant white man could legally hang a black man if that man talked back to him or refused to step aside on the sidewalk to let his white “superior” counterpart pass. The three main characters each live about a decade apart, and each one resides in a different State in the South. Their lives and trades are all different, but the travails they face are oh so common.

These three individuals have the same stories of thousands, if not millions of black people that resided in the South. For them it was only a generation or so ago that their ancestors resided there because they were legal property. After slavery is abolished in 1863, lives get slowly better for people of color in the deep South, but at some point near the turn of the twentieth century, it’s almost as if the white people on the losing side of the U.S. Civil War are still so bitter over their loss, that “Jim Crow” laws are passed that essentially strip away the freedoms of black people all over the South. The option many black people choose after being fed up with years of injustice? They migrate to the North along with their meager belongings where things are supposedly better.

“Better” doesn’t mean good, and this is where this true story can really sink one’s misguided optimism. During a span of about 50 years (from 1919 to 1969), larger cities in the north such as Detroit, Milwaukee, New York, and Chicago see these destitute individuals arrive in multitudes in search of nothing more than basic dignity. Life is much easier in the North, but in an era where Americans were still tribal, the newly arrived migrants aren’t necessarily welcomed with open arms. The newly arrived black population finds themselves regulated to segregated slums and having to scrounge for jobs. It seems like no matter how bad a company might need to hire labor, many white people refuse to work next to a black person, so companies won’t hire the migrants, and the job search becomes much harder, if not impossible.

One of the criticisms of this book is that Ms. Wilkerson doesn’t tell her story in a linear fashion. We jump around quite a bit amongst the three narratives. The fact that each of these three people began their migration in a different decade doesn’t help one keep the accounts straight either. After a while, I confess that I couldn’t really keep up with the many relatives and relations of the three characters. This really didn’t take away from my fascination of the book. The author does a wonderful job explaining to the reader what her characters were going through at the time, and as horrific as most of them were, it manages to hit the point home for the reader in a major way.

She also does a masterful job peppering her story with current events and anecdotes throughout the narrative that drive her thesis home. For example, we read about Olympic Gold Medal winner Jesse Owens who triumphed in Berlin in 1936. Adolph Hitler refused to acknowledge that a black athlete was superior to his Aryan race, so he literally turned his back on Owens during the award presentation. The irony here is that in Berlin, Owens was at least allowed to stay in the same hotel as his white teammates. In his own country, however, the hero not only had to stay in a different, subpar hotel during the Olympic celebration, but he was also forced to enter and exit the hotel through the service entrance.

So the subject matter here isn’t pleasant, but it’s a very necessary history lesson. Although the author doesn’t explicitly connect the dots, she seems to allege that the many present-day problems that people of color encounter in their daily lives in crack infested neighborhoods are a direct result from the neglect, hatred, and isolation of years past during the migration. Yes, there have been strides to improve these situations, we still have quite a journey ahead of us.

In conclusion, if you’re a white person and you can’t fathom why there are still many accusations of racism in today’s culture, I implore you to read this book. If reading this book can’t open your eyes, I honestly don’t know what will. I also pity that you have such a hard heart. We can only hope that things will continue to improve, yet at a much faster pace than what we’ve experienced.

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Levan Fan

Great book, but…

Reviewed in the United States on October 6, 2020

Verified Purchase

Full disclosure: I’m African American, mid 60s, raised in Chicago on the south side until 1970, lived for a while in the South during the 70s (Virginia, Georgia), lived and worked in Harlem during the 80s; parents were originally from the Midwest, but my family on both sides has southern roots; we were a middle-class family. My review is my reaction based on my background and experiences during these times.
Regarding the book, I loved it. It was a bit hard to read at first because of the racial hatred, crimes, and injustices described. Nonetheless, generally I could relate to the stories of the main characters; I know about such stories from my own family and others. However, the picture painted of Blacks in Chicago in the 60s and of African Americans in Harlem in the 80s through the stories of the main characters was not my experience, and I felt it was very one-sided, leaving out a lot and highlighting only what would contribute to the author’s point she wanted to make.
In brief, Chicago’s south side in the 60s was more diverse than was represented in the book—in terms of the socioeconomic status of Blacks and the various characteristics of neighborhoods. I grew up in a neighborhood of very nice houses/homes: fathers worked, mothers raised the children, 3-4 children was the average. The elementary schools were exceptionally good, but not the high schools.
Harlem in the 80s was tremendously affected by the crack epidemic, but cocaine was a drug problem in the 80s everywhere in New York; it just manifested itself differently in Harlem. I worked (in the mental health field) 4 blocks away from the character George and lived 10 blocks away (though not in the same neighborhood), so I was much aware of the issues of the day in Harlem, but also in New York in general. The drug problem in Harlem was the drug problem throughout America at the time, and in every major city regardless of race or migration, non-migration. Additionally, in the 80s, Harlem was very diverse socioeconomically, so I felt that what is portrayed through the main character’s experience during that period is limited in its representativeness of African Americans at the time or its application or connection to migration.

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Top reviews from other countries

Shane White

very good account of the Great Migration

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 18, 2021

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An excellent history of the Great Migration, as told through the experiences of three migrants who moved at different times and for different reasons: one who migrated from Mississippi to Chicago in 1937, one who migrated from Florida to New York in 1945, and one who migrated from Louisiana to Los Angeles in 1953.

The first 183 pages are a detailed account of the three main characters’ lives before they left the South, a section of the book that I felt was far too long. The author could have conveyed the same information in about a hundred and thirty fewer pages.

The following chapters are far more interesting and tell how these people made their way across the country — I love travel stories and this section of the book in particular is especially well written — and document their varied lives in their new homes, from their arrival as young people to their deaths as pensioners many decades later.

One key issue that is frequently touched on but never fully addressed is the impact that the arrival of hundreds of thousands of black migrants had on the receiving cities and on the places the migrants left.
For example, is Chicago a better city now that so many of its residents are black rather than white? Is the South worse off now that it has lost so many black people?
I feel that a chapter on this particular topic would have been a good way to end the book and to analyse the overs effects of the Migration.

Overall, a thoroughly well-written, well-researched and enjoyable book.
I learnt a lot about an important aspect of twentieth-century social history.

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Carolyn

Wonderful interweaving of personal stories and historical facts

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 4, 2020

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I would highly recommend this book which describes the personal stories of 3 black Americans who moved from the South to Northern cities in the US during the Great Migration. It intersperses those stories with historical facts from the time and gives a moving, joyous and painful view into their experiences, hopes and dreams. Their stories show how much we have in common as people, regardless of race or class, and how our individual experiences drive our life choices and outcomes. A truly wonderful piece of work.

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Vikzwrites

An important immersive read l.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 3, 2021

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I loved this book. The Warmth of Other Suns looks at the migration of Black Americans from North to South America. It chronicles the journeys of several individuals. . These weaving narratives highlight the racism faced by Black Americans in both parts of the U.S.A. Each of the narratives is engrossing and Immersive. I highly recommend this book. I received this book via netgalley in exchange for a honest review.

Owen Patrick

The necessity for people of color in the Southern States to the northern cities and California.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 8, 2021

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A poignant, descriptive narrative about the many Americans migration to the Northern cities in the United States and the reasons why. The hardship they faced and the courageous decision to seek a better life but tinged with sadness at leaving behind family who they may not have seen again. A bitter sweet story of migration and the reality of prejudice in America through the years even today. Truly a must read to gain a full understanding of how the human spirit yearns for freedom and equality.

Anonymous

Fantastic book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 7, 2021

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What a great book. I couldn't put it down, so interesting and beautifully written - it reads like a novel with wonderful characters. Have recommended it to so many of my friends - a must read for everyone.

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Buy new:

$22.49

FREE delivery: Friday, April 22 on orders over $25.00 shipped by Amazon.

Ships from: Amazon.com

Sold by: Amazon.com

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