Book Review: The Warmth of Other Suns

Like the best fiction, Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns is a book to savor, a book that is sometimes wrenching to read yet hard to put down.

Wilkerson’s subject is the Great American Migration, the exodus of six million African Americans from the Jim Crow South to the North, Midwest, and West from 1915 to the 1970’s. It’s a subject so vast that Wilkerson’s book is the first history to cover the almost six decades long migration.

The book is vast, too, 600 pages plus, but it’s an easy read. Wilkerson focuses on three of the more than 1200 migrants she interviewed over the fifteen years she spent researching and writing the book.

They are Ida Mae Gladney, a sharecropper’s wife who left Mississippi in 1937; George Starling, a citrus picker who fled Florida in 1945 after learning of his imminent lynching; and Robert Pershing Foster, an Army surgeon who left Louisiana in 1953, outraged that he was not allowed to operate in his hometown hospital.

Wilkerson structures the book so their stories run concurrently, dropping one migrant’s story for another’s after a few pages. Although decades apart, their stories are connected thematically.

For example, in Part Three: Exodus, we leave Ida Mae and her family in the Jim Crow car as their train crosses the Mississippi border and pick up on George, who is traveling fast and with one change of clothes to elude his pursuers, and then to Robert in his Buick Roadmaster with 1000 miles between him and his dream of California. It’s a great device for creating tension, as we anticipate learning how each has fared in the next chapter.

Like people throughout history, black Southerners migrated in search of something better than the society in which they lived. A gifted student, Robert wasn’t allowed to do research in the white only public library. George was targeted for a "necktie party" because he dared to organize a small group of citrus workers. A World War I veteran was beaten to death for wearing his uniform in town.

It’s disturbing to read about the colored only facilities, the humiliating treatment, the torture and lynchings, and the Klan, but Wilkerson conveys the oppression and hopelessness better than any history textbook does.

So what did they find at the end of their migration? In the early years, there was plenty of work.  World War I had cut the supply of European immigrants by more than 90 per cent, and the factories in the North actively recruited in the South for workers to ramp up war production. When the Chicago Commission on Race Relations asked migrants how they were faring after World War I, among the responses were: "Feel free to do anything I please." "Can vote; no lynching." "Feel more like a man." "Find it easier to live because I have more to live on."

In time those jobs were gone, and the Southern blacks were competing with Northern whites for work. Resentment grew as did racism, although not clearly delineated by "for whites only" signs. If a black family managed to move into a white neighborhood, they might find the entire block abandoned by whites in a matter of months.

When Jesse Owens went to the reception that followed the ticker-tape parade celebrating his 1936 Olympic victories, he had to ride the freight elevator at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. And when George and a friend stop for a beer in Penn Station in the 1950’s, they barely notice that most of the other patrons are white. However, as they leave, they hear the sound of their glasses being smashed rather than washed.

The daughter of migrants from Georgia and Virginia, Wilkerson grew up with the advantages her parents had dreamed of for their children. She went on to become the first black woman in the history of American journalism to win a Pulitzer Prize. The Warmth of Other Suns is her first book and the winner of the National Book Critics Award for Nonfiction among other honors.

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The Non-Fiction Book Group will meet to discuss The Warmth of Other Suns at 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday, February 29, in the Marx Room at the . Everyone is welcome - even if you haven't read the book. The Easton Area Public Library has several copies of The Warmth of Other Suns.

Isabel Wilkerson will talk about her book at on Tuesday, February 28. This free program will be held at 4:15 p.m. in Zoellner Arts Center. Visit http://tiny.cc/vwyiv for more information.