Warmth of Other Suns

Biography (from her website)

• Isabel Wilkerson was born in Washington, D.C. in 1961 to parents who left Virginia during the Great Migration. Her father was one of the Tuskegee Airmen during World War II.

• Wilkerson studied journalism at Howard University, becoming editor-in-chief of the college newspaper The Hilltop. During college, she interned at publications including the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post.

• She became the Chicago Bureau Chief of The New York Times, and taught at Emory, Princeton, Northwestern, and Boston University.

Biography (from her website)

• In 1994, while the Chicago Bureau Chief of The New York Times, she became the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism, winning the feature writing award for her coverage of the 1993 midwestern floods and her profile of a 10-year-old boy who was responsible for his four siblings.

• Several of Wilkerson's articles are included in the book Pulitzer Prize Feature Stories: America's Best Writing, 1979 - 2003.

• After fifteen years of research and writing, she published The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration in 2010 which examines the three geographic routes that were commonly used by African Americans leaving the southern states.

Biography (from her website)

• During her research for the book, Wilkerson interviewed more than 1,000 people who made the migration from the South to Northern and Western cities.

• The book almost instantly hit number 5 on the New York Times Bestseller list for nonfiction and has since been included in lists of best books of 2010 by many reviewers, including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, Amazon.com, Salon.com, The Washington Post, The Economist, Atlanta Magazine and The Daily Beast.

• In March 2011 the book won the National Book Critics Circle Award (Nonfiction). The book also won the Anisfield-Wolf Award for Nonfiction, the Mark Lynton History Prize, the Sidney Hillman Book Prize, the Heartland Prize for Nonfiction and was also the nonfiction runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize in 2011.

Reviews

• In her years of research, Wilkerson raced against the clock to reach as many original migrants as she could before it was too late, interviewing more than 1,200 to identify the book’s three main characters. The result is what the judges of the Lynton History Prize, conferred by Harvard and Columbia universities, described thusly:

• “Wilkerson has created a brilliant and innovative paradox: the intimate epic. At its smallest scale, this towering work rests on a trio of unforgettable biographies, lives as humble as they were heroic. . . . In different decades and for different reasons they headed north and west, along with millions of fellow travelers. . . . In powerful, lyrical prose that combines the historian’s rigor with the novelist’s empathy, Wilkerson’s book changes our understanding of the Great Migration and indeed of the modern United States.”

Reviews

• Wilkerson has logged not just the dates and figures that make these stories fact and thus formal history, she’s made indelible the fading music of these voices, the dance of their speech patterns, the intricate chemistry of folk cures and cornbread rendered from scratch.

• Beyond the family china or a great-grandmother’s wedding ring, there was always the ambient fear that these stories were actually the most fragile pieces in the hope chest—the easiest to go missing. What she’s done with these oral histories is stow memory in amber.” —Los Angeles Times

Reviews

• In The Warmth of Other Suns, three lives, three people, three stories, are asked to stand in for six million. Can three people explain six million? Do they have to? Your answers probably depend, mostly, on your intellectual proclivities. You’re reading this magazine; chances are you lean toward thinking that stories, good stories, explain. . . .

• This is narrative nonfiction, lyrical and tragic and fatalist. The story exposes; the story moves; the story ends. What Wilkerson urges, finally, isn’t argument at all; it’s compassion. Hush, and listen.” —Jill Lepore, The New Yorker

Publications (from her website)

• Wilkerson's book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents argues that racial stratification in the United States is best understood as a caste system, akin to those in India and in Nazi Germany.

• A 2020 review in the New York Times described it as "an instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far."

• Publishers Weekly called Caste a “powerful and extraordinarily timely social history.”

• The Chicago Tribune wrote that the book was "among the year’s best" books.

• The book peaked at number one on The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list. On October 14, 2020, Netflix announced Ava DuVernay will write, direct, and produce a feature film adaptation of Caste.

On the origins of this book

• I began this work because I wanted to pull readers deep inside perhaps the greatest untold story of the Twentieth Century. The goal was to convey the lives of people who dared to make the crossing from the South to all points North and West in what would come to be known as the Great Migration.

• I wanted readers to imagine themselves in a hot, open field facing endless rows of cotton needing to be picked, having to bear the arcane laws of an arbitrary caste system and having to labor over the decision of their lives―whether to stay or whether to go.

• To capture the magnitude of the phenomenon, I chose to trace the journeys of three different people who followed the three main streams of the Great Migration over the course of the decades it unfolded. To find them, I needed to reach as many as I could of this dwindling generation before it was too late.

On the origins of this book

• So, in the mid-1990s, I set out on a search for people who had migrated from the South to the North and West during the span of the Great Migration. That search led me to senior centers, AARP meetings, quilting clubs, high school reunions, union meetings of retired postal workers and bus drivers, Catholic masses in Los Angeles, Baptist churches where most everyone was from South Carolina and the various southern state clubs in the New World—particularly, Louisiana and Texas Clubs in Los Angeles and Mississippi and Arkansas Clubs in Chicago.

• In these and dozens of other places frequented by seniors, I collected names and stories, interviewing more than 1,200 people who shared with me preliminary versions of their experiences. I conducted follow-up interviews with three dozen people and settled on three complementary subjects through whose lives I hoped to recreate the broad sweep of the movement.

On the origins of this book

• The book is essentially three projects in one. The first was a collection of oral histories from around the country. This was a major challenge: Many survivors of the Jim Crow caste system did not want to talk about what they had endured, had not told even their own children and grandchildren the experiences they ultimately shared with me.

• The second phase was the distillation of those oral histories into a narrative of three protagonists—Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster.

• The third was an analysis of newspaper accounts and scholarly and literary works of the era and more recent scholarship of the Migration to recount the motivations, circumstances and perceptions of the migration as it was in progress and to put the subjects’ actions into historical context.

On the origins of this book

• The main protagonists and many of the secondary people were interviewed for dozens, if not hundreds of hours, most of it tape-recorded and transcribed. I returned to their counties of origin to interview the surviving people who knew them and to retrace their lives in the South.

• I went back to Chickasaw County with Ida Mae Gladney in the late 1990s during the same time of year she had originally left Mississippi. There, we revisited the places and people she had known. I saw cotton growing for the first time in my life, and we stopped, at her behest, to pick a few bolls of it.

On the origins of this book

• I reenacted all or part of these migration routes, devoting most of my time to the migration of Robert Foster, which meant driving from Monroe, Louisiana, to Houston and Laredo, Texas, to Lordsburg, New Mexico, Phoenix, San Diego, Los Angeles and on to Oakland, as Dr. Foster described in bitter detail, with my parents as generational tour guides for most of the journey. My father took notes and my mother offered commentary as I tried to recreate the experience of one person driving the entire distance through the desert night.

• What you see in the book is essentially what I envisioned from the start. I had no idea it would take fifteen years to complete when I set out on my own journey to research and write this narrative. But it was an honor to tell the stories of these remarkable people, of the courage and fortitude of the forebears of many Americans, North and South, and an untold part of our country’s history.

Methodology

• I began this work because of what I saw as incomplete perceptions, outside of scholarly circles, of what the Great Migration was and how and why it happened, particularly through the eyes of those who experienced it. Because it was so unwieldy and lasted for so long, the movement did not appear to rise to the level of public consciousness that, by any measure, it seemed to deserve. The first question, in my view, had to do with its time frame: what was it, and when precisely did it occur?

• The Great Migration is often described as a jobs-driven, World War I movement, despite decades of demographic evidence and real-world indicators that it not only continued well into the 1960s but gathered steam with each decade, not ending until the social, political, and economic reasons for the Migration began truly to be addressed in the South in the dragged-out, belated response to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Methodology

• The second question had to do with where it occurred. The migration from Mississippi to Chicago has been the subject of the most research through the years and has dominated discussion of the phenomenon, in part because of the sheer size of the black influx there and because of the great scholarly interest taken in it by a cadre of social scientists working in Chicago at the start of the Migration. However, from my years as a national correspondent at The New York Times and my early experiences growing up in a world surrounded by people who had come to the mid-Atlantic region during the latter half of the migration from all over the southeastern seaboard, I knew it to be a farther-reaching national resettlement than had been described by most studies of it.

Methodology

• Third, as most studies of the Migration focused on the important questions of demographics, politics, economics, and sociology, I wanted to convey the intimate stories of people who had dared to make the crossing. I wanted to capture the vastness of the phenomenon by tracking unrelated people who had followed the multiple streams of the Great Migration over the course of the decades it unfolded. I wanted to reach as many as I could of this dwindling generation in the spirit of the oral history projects with the last surviving slaves back in the 1930s.

Methodology

• The book is essentially three projects in one. The first was a collection of oral histories from around the country. The second was the distillation of those oral histories into a narrative of three protagonists, each of whom led a sufficiently full life to merit a book in his or her own right and was thus researched and reported as such. The third was an examination of newspaper accounts and scholarly and literary works of the era and more recent analyses of the Migration to recount the motivations, circumstances, and perceptions of the Migration as it was in progress and to put the subjects’ actions into historical context.

• As might be expected, the participants in the Migration had keener memories of their formative years and of the high and low points of their lives—the basis of this book—than of the more mundane and less relevant aspects of their retirement years.

Methodology

• Some subjects recalled certain moments of their lives with greater detail than did other subjects recounting the same point in their own trajectory, which is reflected in the text. Furthermore, in their wisdom and commitment to an accurate rendering of events, they frequently declined to speculate or press beyond what they recollected.

• Where possible, I confirmed or clarified their accounts through interviews with the waning circle of surviving witnesses, cohorts, and family members; through newspaper accounts in the South and North dating back to 1900; and through census, military, railroad, school, state, and municipal records. The primary subjects and many of the secondary informants were interviewed for dozens, if not hundreds, of hours, most of the interviews tape-recorded and transcribed.

Methodology

• I returned to their counties of origin to interview the surviving people who knew them and to retrace their lives in the South. I then reenacted all or part of each subject’s migration route, devoting most of my time to the migration of Robert Foster, which meant driving from Monroe, Louisiana, to Houston and Laredo, Texas, to Lordsburg, New Mexico, Phoenix, San Diego, Los Angeles, and on to Oakland, as Dr. Foster described in bitter detail, with my parents as generational tour guides for most of the journey. My father took notes and my mother offered commentary as I tried to re-create the experience of one person driving the entire distance through the desert night.

Methodology

• “You know he must have been ready to cry right about in here,” my mother said as the car I had rented, a new Buick as was his when he made the crossing, hurtled into hairpin curves in total darkness with hundreds of miles yet to go.

• As it turned out, I was not able to reenact to the letter one of the most painful aspects of the drive. I was nearly ready to fall asleep at the wheel by the time we reached Yuma, Arizona. My parents insisted that we stop. We got a hotel room with, of course, no trouble at all, the one thing he had been so desperate for all those decades ago but that was denied him over and over again that long night in 1953.

The Great Migration (adapted from TED Talk)

• The Great Migration was the outpouring of six million African Americans from the Jim Crow South to the cities of the North and West, from the time of World War I until the 1970s. This was the first time in American history that American citizens had to flee the land of their birth just to be recognized as the citizens that they had always been. No other group of Americans has had to act like immigrants in order to be recognized as citizens.

• Thus the Great Migration was not solely about moving. It was a seeking of political asylum within the borders of one’s own country. They were defecting a caste system known as Jim Crow. It was an artificial hierarchy in which everything that you could and could not do was based upon what you looked like. During the era of Jim Crow, a person could go to jail if you were caught playing checkers with a person of a different race in Birmingham, Alabama, for example.

The Great Migration (adapted from TED Talk)

• This artificial hierarchy, because it goes against human desires to be free, required a tremendous amount of violence to maintain. Such that every four days, somewhere in the American South, every four days an African American was lynched for some perceived breach of protocol in this caste system in the decades leading up to the start of the Great Migration.

• This Great Migration began during World War I, when the North faced a tremendous labor shortage. The North had been relying on the cheap labor of European immigrants to work its factories, foundries, and steel mills.

The Great Migration (adapted from TED Talk)

• But during World War I, migration from Europe came to a virtual halt. And so the North sought out the cheapest labor in the land, which meant African Americans in the South, many of whom were not being paid for their hard work. Many of them were working for the right to live on the land that they were farming. They were sharecroppers and not even being paid. So they were ripe for recruitment.

The Great Migration (adapted from TED Talk)

• Before the Great Migration began, 90 percent of all African Americans were living in the South. Nearly held captive in the South. But by the time this Great Migration was over, nearly half were living all over the rest of the country, making the Great Migration a complete redistribution of part of an entire people.

• This Great Migration was the first time in American history that the lowest caste people signaled that they had options and were willing to take them. That had not happened in the three centuries in which African Americans had been on this soil at that time. It had not happened in the twelve generations of enslavement that preceded nearly a century of Jim Crow.

• The people of the Great Migration met with tremendous resistance in the North. And they were not able to defeat all social injustice.

The Great Migration (adapted from TED Talk)

• But one person added to another person, added to another person, multiplied by millions, were able to become the advance guard of the civil rights movement.

• One person added to another person, added to another person, multiplied by millions, acting on a single decision, were able to change the region that they had been forced to flee. They had more power in leaving than by staying.

• By their actions, these people who had absolutely nothing were able to do what a president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, was not able to do.

• These people, by their actions, were able to do what the Emancipation Proclamation could not do.

• These people, by their actions, were able to do what the powers that be, North and South, could not or would not do. They freed themselves.

Interviews/Videos

• Isabel Wilkerson's TED Talk, delivered November 2017

• Ken Burns and Isabel Wilkerson

• PBS News Hour (on Caste)

Book Title

• From the poem "Black Boy" (1945) by Richard Wright who moved from the South to Chicago in the 1920s.

I was leaving the South

to fling myself into the unknown . . .

I was taking a part of the South

to transplant in alien soil,

to see if it could grow differently,

if it could drink of new and cool rains,

bend in strange winds,

respond to the warmth of other suns

and, perhaps, to bloom.

Ida Mae Brandon Gladney (From website: warmth.isabelwilkerson.com/)

• Ida Mae Brandon Gladney was a sharecropper’s wife who left her home in Mississippi soon after her cousin was almost beaten to death after being falsely accused of stealing a turkey from a white man.

• Leaving behind the backbreaking work of picking cotton for low wages, Ida begins a new life in Chicago, where she eventually finds contentment and raises a family.

• Over the course of her life, she moves from an innocent to a realistic approach to the world, but she never becomes bitter, even as the neighborhood around her slowly deteriorates.

• Of the three main characters profiled by Wilkerson in The Warmth of Other Suns, Ida Mae seems like the happiest and most well-adjusted, as she manages to live life with a grace and dignity and never really let the anger that others have influence her life.

George Swanson Starling (From website: warmth.isabelwilkerson.com/)

• George Swanson Starling was a headstrong college student forced by circumstances to work the citrus groves of Florida; although he aspired to a college education, he was not able to finish his degree.

• Marrying young and impulsively, George’s life was a rollercoaster that never seemed to allow him much peace or the chance to settle down. Having stood up to orange grove owners by leading a strike for fairer wages for the workers, George was forced to flee Florida to avoid being the target a lynch mob.

• He heads to New York where both triumph and tragedy await him.

George Swanson Starling (From website: warmth.isabelwilkerson.com/)

• George Swanson Starling as a young man in Eustis, Florida, where he was a citrus worker. Knows as "Schoolboy" because he was the only one of his crew to have gone to college.

Robert Pershing Foster (From website: warmth.isabelwilkerson.com/)

• An ambitious surgeon who journeys from Louisiana to California to escape the caste system of the South. He chafes because he can perform surgery for the United States Army but is not permitted to do a simple tonsillectomy in his hometown hospital. He struggles at first in the New World, but eventually rises to high society in black Los Angeles and becomes personal physician to the singer Ray Charles, but pays a price.

Questions for discussion

• Of the hundreds of people that Wilkerson interviewed, well over 1,000, she selected these three people, and their lives, to tell this story.

• Why do you think she chose these three people?

• They are certainly individuals, but are they also representative of something larger?

Questions for discussion

• In her TED talk, Isabel Wilkerson described the migration of Black Americans from the South to the North as more like the "immigration" of people from other countries to the U.S. She said:

  • This was the first time in American history that American citizens had to flee the land of their birth just to be recognized as the citizens that they had always been. No other group of Americans has had to act like immigrants in order to be recognized as citizens.

• Do you see other parallels between immigrant newcomers to these shores and the resettlement of residents to other parts of the U.S?

Questions for discussion

• Charles Frazier's novel, Cold Mountain, is also about a kind of migration, namely Inman's journey, with all its travails like the classic epic The Odyssey, from the battles of the Civil War to his home in North Carolina.

• Is there any correlation between this book, Warmth of Other Suns, and Cold Mountain (other than references to the temperature)?

Questions for discussion

• This book is classified as historical non-fiction, a genre that some readers find rather dry and unappealing. But this book reads like a narrative.

• David McCullough is another famous author of historical non-fiction, whom we will read and discuss shortly, also known for his narrative style.

• What makes these books "come alive." What happens to "fact" in these historical non-fiction works?

Breakout Room Question

• What did you take away from reading this book? What will you remember about it? What will you tell someone who asks about this book?

Breakout Room Question—additional

• This is the last of a very short list of Southern literature, but representative. What knowledge, appreciation, insight, or something else, have you found in these works?

• Is the South a literary entity all unto itself?

Next Week

• Saddle up your horse, load the covered wagon, and, maybe, buckle your gun belt, we move West next week.

• But you have no reading due for two weeks, October 27,

• when we read The Pioneers, David McCullough.