The Warmth of Other Suns
by Isabel Wilkerson
Six million people left the South. Here are three of them.
For you if
you want to understand the shape of Black America — where people live, why they live there, what it cost to get there
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Six million Black Americans left the South between 1915 and 1970 in what Wilkerson calls the Great Migration — one of the largest internal migrations in human history. She tells this story through three people: Ida Mae Brandon Gladney from Mississippi to Chicago, George Swanson Starling from Florida to New York, Robert Joseph Pershing Foster from Louisiana to Los Angeles. Twelve years of research, twelve hundred interviews. The most comprehensive single-volume account of what Black Americans did with the freedom the South refused to give them.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- North America
- Voice
- Written by a North America author
Related Viewing
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Why it’s here: Punk in refusing David Lurie any easy redemption — his disgrace doesn't get neatly resolved by his daughter's choices or the new South Africa's politics. Pedagogical in showing how a personal reckoning with abused power looks nothing like an apology.
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