The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration
Recommended by: Donna Murphy
Posted in: African American Experiences
Purchase →This nonfiction tour de force tells the story of the great African-American migration from the south to the north and the west, 1915-1970. It does so by interweaving macroeconomic trends and statistics with the lives of three migrants who fled small-town poverty and racism in Mississippi, Florida and Louisiana, only to find a complex set of challenges in Chicago, Harlem and Los Angeles.
The statistics are illuminating: A bale of cotton, which represented 14 full days of picking, sold for 30 cents in the mid-1920s, and 6 cents in 1931. In Mississippi in the 1930s, white teachers on average earned $630 a year, and black teachers, $215. Before the Great Migration, 10% of blacks in America lived outside the south, while after it, 47% did, including an increase of blacks in Chicago from 44,103 before, to over one million afterwards.
The stories of three individuals, told from beginning to end, make the numbers real. Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Wilkerson patiently gathered hundreds of hours of oral history from the subjects, their friends and relatives, enabling their stories to give voice to the 6 million blacks who fled Jim Crow in the south. Migration was, one interviewee said, “like getting unstuck from a magnet.” This book, all 640 pages of it, is magnificent.