The Warmth of Other Suns: the Epic Story of America's Great Migration

Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Isabel Wilkerson narrates one of the great unsung tales of American history in this epic, masterfully written work: the decades-long movement of black residents seeking better lives in northern and western cities, fleeing the South.

This migration of over six million individuals altered the face of America between 1915 and 1970. Wilkerson makes a historical comparison between this epic exodus and other people's migrations. With the help of over a thousand interviews, fresh information, and access to government documents, she was able to compile this authoritative and very emotional story of how these American voyages changed our towns, our nation, and ourselves.

Wilkerson narrates this tale with striking historical detail by following the lives of three distinct characters: The prickly and quick-tempered George Starling, who fled Florida for Harlem in 1945 and saw his family disintegrate before finding peace in God; Ida Mae Gladney, who left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago in 1937 and went on to achieve quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, vote for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a career in medicine, becoming Ray Charles' personal physician as part of a glitteringly successful medical career that enabled him to buy a mansion where he frequently threw extravagant parties.

In addition to describing their new lifestyles in colonies that developed into ghettos, Wilkerson masterfully depicts their first perilous and laborious cross-country travels by automobile and rail. He also discusses how they transformed these cities with southern cuisine, religion, and culture and enhanced them with discipline, determination, and hard work. The Warmth of Other Suns is a daring, astonishing, and enthralling book that provides an excellent depiction of a "unrecognized immigration" inside our own country. It is both a broad evaluation and a captivating microcosm. This book is certain to become a classic because of the scope of its story, the elegance of its writing, the depth of its research, and the richness of the people and lives it portrays.