The Warmth of Other Suns (2010)
Isabel Wilkerson (1961)
622 pages
The renowned historian W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in the opening lines of his celebrated work The Souls of Black Folk (my review here) that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.” From that prophetic observation, Du Bois proceeded over the course of fourteen powerful essays to describe the crippling social, political and economic situation faced by freed slaves in the South in the final decades of the 19th century, a period during which the short-lived promise of Reconstruction evaporated as Northerners’ interest shifted to the greater perceived economic benefit promised by reconciliation with the white South.
By the time Du Bois’ book appeared in 1903, politicians in the states of the former confederacy were aggressively codifying a separate and unequal situation for their black citizens in the form of Jim Crow laws. Thus, as the 20th century opened, extensive legal restrictions and deeply entrenched social proscriptions constrained most blacks in the South to a life as share croppers or day laborers. Factor in the ever-present risk of generally unprosecuted beatings and lynchings, and the situation for blacks in the south was little better than the slavery they had nominally escaped just a few decades before.
In one critical sense, however, things had changed dramatically for the former slaves: they now had freedom of movement. Though traveling for blacks remained unpleasant --- and far from risk-free --- the extreme dangers that had earlier led to the creation of the Underground Railroad were now largely a thing of the past. As a result, in the early years of the 20th century a small number of blacks began migrating North and West, looking to escape the desperate hopelessness and every-present risks that dominated their lives in the South.
Then, with the onset of World War I, industries in the North faced worker shortages and began aggressively pursuing cheap labor from the South, providing additional impetus to the tentative migration that had begun. The trickle of people leaving the South suddenly transformed into a growing flood that lasted well beyond the end of the war, as those who left became beacons of success and hope for relatives and friends who remained behind.
The environment in the South that helped motivate this migration and the experiences of those who joined the movement North and West form the basis of journalist Isabel Wilkerson’s engaging and thought-provoking work The Warmth of Other Suns, which recounts what her subtitle refers to as The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. She describes the main period of this migration as having lasted from 1915 to 1970, six decades that transformed the country, as
some six million black southerners abandoned the land of their forefathers and fanned out across the country for an uncertain existence in nearly every corner of America. The Great Migration would become a turning point in history. It would transform urban America and recast the social and political order of every city it touched. It would force the South to search its soul and finally to lay aside a feudal caste system. It grew out of unmet promises made after the Civil War and, through the sheer weight of it, helped push the country toward the civil rights revolutions of the 1960s. (9)
Through Wilkerson’s captivating narrative the personal impacts and experiences of this migration come alive for readers. Eschewing a simple, dry recounting of the period’s social history, Wilkerson instead builds the story around the lives of three specific people who made the move out of the South, three individuals with concrete histories. Though she includes brief interludes that step back to fill in the broader historical details, those vignettes are generally at most a few pages long. The majority of her story consists of a series of sections that rotate between her three principals, starting from their early lives in the South, through their migration North or West, to their new homes in cities distant from their birthplaces.
The three people whose lives she chronicles each grew up in different parts of the South, allowing Wilkerson to highlight the variety of black experience and struggle across the region in the context of the broad range of Jim Crow laws and unofficial yet violently enforced social constrictions that existed. They also migrated in different decades, and to different cities in the North and West of the country, and so experienced differently the newfound freedoms outside the South, as well as the numerous challenges of trying to find jobs and housing, and raising families far from their southern roots.
We are introduced first to Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, who worked as a sharecropper picking cotton along with her husband and two children in Mississippi; she and her family migrated to Chicago in 1937, as the beatings and lynchings come too close to home and life too dangerous to continue on in the south. Next we meet George Swanson Starling, who grew up in the Citrus belt of Florida; forced by his father to abandon his dreams of college after his sophomore year, he worked as a day laborer in the citrus fields until his agitating for better pay for the workers forced him to escape to New York City in 1945. Finally there is Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, who grew up in central Louisiana witnessing the challenges faced by his father as a school principal, and his mother a teacher; Foster chafed at the lack of opportunity and rigid caste system in his hometown, and when an opportunity to go to Morehouse College in Atlanta presented itself, he trained as a doctor, and eventually settled in Los Angeles in 1953.
Wilkerson opens the book by briefly introducing her three main characters, as well as the broader history of the Great Migration they become a part of, before dividing the main narrative arc of her story into three major parts. The first section describes her characters’ experiences growing up in the Jim Crow South. The second focuses on the events that finally led each of them to make the life-upending decision to escape the crushing reality of their lives in the South and migrate far from their families and hometowns. The third then describes the world each of them encountered in their destination cities: the many freedoms they discovered, but also the challenges they faced as they settled into a world that, though it did not have the level of restriction and violence of the South, confronted them with unwritten, and shockingly rigid rules at every turn. The book closes by describing the final years of the three, as they reflect back on their experiences and also the impact their choice to migrate had on their children and grandchildren who grew up in the North and West.
By focusing the book on the lives of these three particular individuals, within the context of the broader history of black life in America in the 20th century, Wilkerson makes the story of the Great Migration more personal for readers. It becomes difficult to cling to the misunderstandings and incorrect assumptions that seem to have endured for so many about the post-slavery reality of the black experience. Faced with specific migrants whose backstory we come to know, and so about whom we come to care as individuals, the soul-sapping discrimination and terror they repeatedly encountered becomes impossible to dismiss and ignore.
And, in fact, many events that Wilkerson describes recall the line from Mark Twain: “Truth is stranger than fiction.” However horrific the period of slavery that came before this migration was, when learning about its details, one can fall back onto the concrete fact that the slaves were in a condition of complete subjugation, and so perhaps ‘not surprisingly’ at the mercy of brutal owners and masters. It seems to become all too short and easy a walk from that idea, however, to the perniciously false conclusion that that time and those conditions ended over a century and a half ago with the Emancipation Proclamation and the 14th Amendment, and so to dismiss their impact and relevance for our society during the 20th Century, or, for that matter, the 21st.
Wilkerson’s book makes readily evident the fallacy inherent in such thinking and assumptions, by demonstrating through the experiences of Ida Mae Gladney, George Starling and Robert Foster the searing impact of the Jim Crow laws on the day-to-day lives of blacks. It is not just that violence happened: we read about an in-law of Ida Mae’s who is nearly beaten to death over a misunderstanding that didn’t even actually involve him. It is not just that black education was poorly funded: we read about Robert’s high school, at which “every few years, a teacher … loaded a band of students onto the flat bed of a pick-up … pulled up to the back entrance of the white high school in town … and began stacking the truck bed with the books the white school was throwing away.” (84) And it’s not just that blacks had to sit in the back of the bus or in certain parts of the train: we read about George Starling moving north and becoming a train porter working on trains going up and down the east coast, and having to lead blacks who had boarded in the north-east free to sit anywhere to segregated cars as the train crossed the Mason-Dixon line into the South.
The hard truth is that these were not events of 150 years ago, or isolated stories; these events happened to people we come to know and care about, and occurred still in the middle of the 20th century, not so very long ago.
And it is finally this --- the recognition of the nearness to our own time and lives more than the events themselves --- becomes the most powerful and affecting part of Wilkerson’s story: the Jim Crow laws and ever-threatening vigilante violence in the South, and the unofficial but still sometimes violently defended discrimination outside the South, happened in the lifetime of Baby Boomers, or the lifetimes of the parents of those born later --- not in some distant past that might allow one to disassociate oneself and one’s understanding of and opinions about modern-day society from it.
Toward the end of the book, Wilkerson summarizes previous work done on the history of black lives in the 20th century, and the migration that so many participated in, recalling that:
Throughout the Migration, social scientists all but concluded that … the Migration had led to the troubles of the urban North and West … blaming the dysfunction of the inner cities on the migrants themselves [who] were cast as poor illiterates who imported out-of-wedlock births, joblessness, and welfare dependency wherever they went.” (528)But, she notes:
Newly available census records suggest the opposite to be true. … the migrants were, it turns out … [when] compared to the northern blacks already there … more likely to be married and remain married, more likely to raise their children in two-parent households, and more likely to be employed [and] to earn higher incomes than northern-born blacks even though they were relegated to the lowest-paying positions ... [and] were less likely to be on welfare. (528)Wilkerson’s book plays an important role in explaining this more accurate understanding of our past, and its impact on our present --- the on-going “problem of the color-line.”
Through her work, it becomes evident that the roots of the decay that struck major American cities in the second half of the 20th century are not to be found in some inherent personal failing of the migrants themselves, but rather in the social and economic milieu they encountered in the cities of the North and West they migrated to. Boxed into limited parts of the city that did not contain sufficient housing, they often paid more for places than the whites who had moved out, to landlords who had little incentive to perform maintenance given the captive market that made demand larger than supply. The resulting decay and decline of these neighborhoods became a self-fulfilling prophecy for whites in surrounding areas, who then doubled down on their efforts to exclude blacks from their neighborhoods, with violence if necessary.
These migrants also faced wide-spread discrimination as they looked for work, with many companies unwilling to hire them because of the reactions of existing white employees, leaving them with the lowest paid jobs, and little if any prospect for advancement. Migrants who came out of the South, however, “had experienced such hard times, and were willing to work longer hours or second jobs in positions that few northern blacks, or hardly anyone else for that matter wanted.” (528)
Thus by dint of their hardscrabble pasts --- and a powerful pride that would not let them return as failures to their family and friends back home --- they found ways to succeed despite the many challenges. And though many saw their children struggle to escape the destructive impacts of discrimination in their new cities, some climbed out of the enforced poverty to find great success --- with their children even becoming, as Wilkerson points out, political leaders in their hometowns.
In The Warmth of Other Suns, Wilkerson succeeds brilliantly in giving us an intimate look at a critical period in American history, one that transformed the entire country as it unfolded over the middle half of the 20th Century. By choosing characters who came from three different states and circumstances in the South, and who each migrated in different decades to different parts of the U.S., Wilkerson provides a flavor of the variety of experiences of the many millions who joined in this Great Migration, and in so doing, makes personal for the reader not only the details of this history, but the deep ties it has to the issues and challenges in our current society.
Other reviews / information:
A website with pictures of the principals in the book, and additional information, is available at the link here.
On her program On Being, Krista Tippett has an engaging interview with Isabel Wilkerson. I recommend both the unedited and edited versions, which are available as podcasts at the link at the right.
The challenges and discrimination that Wilkerson describes blacks facing in the area of housing are summarized in a New York Times editorial, Blacks Still Face a Red Line on Housing, which charts the origins and history of red lining, and carries the story forward to the present day.
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
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