Rating: *****
Tags: General, United States, History, Social Science, Ethnic Studies, African American Studies, Sociology, 20th Century, Social History, African Americans, Emigration & Immigration, Migration; Internal, Migrations, Rural-Urban Migration - United States - History - 20th Century, Migration; Internal - United States - History - 20th Century, Rural-Urban Migration, African Americans - Migrations - History - 20th Century, Lang:en
Summary
In this epic, 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.