We travel the long highway miles between Monroe, Louisiana to Los Angeles, California with Dr. We escape from Florida's citrus groves to Harlem in 1945 with George Swanson Starling, who risks lynching by organizing his fellow fruit pickers to strike for higher wages. We ride a train north in the late 1930's from Mississippi to Milwaukee with pregnant Ida Mae Gladney, her husband and two small children, who abandon their lives as cotton sharecroppers and eventually make a home in Chicago's South Side. She takes the very difficult subject of Jim Crow - one that is so horrifying it is hard to absorb and accept- and humanizes it by telling the stories of three participants in the Great Migration.

The Warmth of Other Sons is one of the finest pieces of narrative non-fiction I have read.

Wilkerson is also a consummate story-teller. She conducted over twelve hundred interviews and spent several years examining primary source documents, scholarly and literary works that witness, analyze and recount the beginnings of Jim Crow South in the 1880's, through the end of the Great Migration in the 1970's.īut Ms. That Isabel Wilkerson is an award-winning journalist is evident in her intense, encompassing and rigorous research. It was perhaps the most significant event of 20th century America and few of us know anything about it. 10) It was an act of individuals and families - breaking free of the cruel grip of Jim Crow - that grew into an extended social revolution. It was, as the author states, '.the first mass act of independence by a people who were in bondage in the country far longer than they have been free.' (p.

They followed the trails and tracks of the Underground Railroad laid down by generations of escaped slaves and abolitionists before them, settling primarily in Chicago, Milwaukee, Gary, IN, New York, Newark and Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Oakland. The list of awards and accolades is so long the book does not need my imprimateur, but I will echo each and every one by saying, 'Read this.'įrom 1915 to 1970, thousands of black Americans undertook a pilgrimage of hope and determination that led them from cotton fields, rice and tobacco plantations, from villages and towns in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia to a new world in the north. The Warmth of Other Suns is a transformative book, one that can profoundly change and shape the way we view American history.

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