Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Darla Schueth and Sue Deans

Author:   Isabel Wilkerson

Genre:   Nonfiction, History, Cultural

622 pages, published September 7, 2010

Reading Format:   Audiobook

Summary

The Warmth of Other Suns tells the story of the decades-long migration of six million black Americans who fled Jim Crow South in search of a better life and landed in the north and western parts of the United States.  In researching the book, Wilkerson interviewed more than a thousand people, but focuses on three individuals:  Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success; George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where fought for civil rights; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 for Los Angeles to pursue a medical career and became the personal physician to Ray Charles.  All faced discrimination and hardship but still felt that leaving the South was the right thing to do.

Quotes 

“They did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done. They left.”

 

“It occurred to me that no matter where I lived, geography could not save me.”

 

“Our Negro problem, therefore, is not of the Negro’s making. No group in our population is less responsible for its existence. But every group is responsible for its continuance…. Both races need to understand that their rights and duties are mutual and equal and their interests in the common good are idential…. There is no help or healing in apparaising past responsibilities or in present apportioning of praise or blame. The past is of value only as it aids in understanding the present; and an understanding of the facts of the problem–a magnanimous understanding by both races–is the first step toward its solution.”

 

 “The measure of a man’s estimate of your strength,” he finally told them, “is the kind of weapons he feels that he must use in order to hold you fast in a prescribed place.”

 

“They traveled deep into far-flung regions of their own country and in some cases clear across the continent. Thus the Great Migration had more in common with the vast movements of refugees from famine, war, and genocide in other parts of the world, where oppressed people, whether fleeing twenty-first-century Darfur or nineteenth-century Ireland, go great distances, journey across rivers, desserts, and oceans or as far as it takes to reach safety with the hope that life will be better wherever they land.”

 

 “Over the decades, perhaps the wrong questions have been asked about the Great Migration. Perhaps it is not a question of whether the migrants brought good or ill to the cities they fled to or were pushed or pulled to their destinations, but a question of how they summoned the courage to leave in the first place or how they found the will to press beyond the forces against them and the faith in a country that had rejected them for so long. By their actions, they did not cream the American Dream, they willed it into being by a definition of their own choosing. They did not ask to be accepted but declared themselves the Americans that perhaps few others recognized but that they had always been deep within their hearts.”

 

 “Jim Crow had a way of turning everyone against one another, not just white against black or landed against lowly, but poor against poorer and black against black for an extra scrap of privilege.”

 

“The revolution had come too late for him. He was in his midforties when the Civil Rights Act was signed and close to fifty when its effects were truly felt. He did not begrudge the younger generation their opportunities. He only wished that more of them, his own children, in particular, recognized their good fortune, the price that had been paid for it, and made the most of it. He was proud to have lived to see the change take place.  He wasn’t judging anyone and accepted the fact that history had come too late for him to make much use of all the things that were now opening up. But he couldn’t understand why some of the young people couldn’t see it. Maybe you had to live through the worst of times to recognize the best of times when they came to you. Maybe that was just the way it was with people.”

 

 “Many of the people who left the South never exactly sat their children down to tell them these things, tell them what happened and why they left and how they and all this blood kin came to be in this northern city or western suburb or why they speak like melted butter and their children speak like footsteps on pavement, prim and proper or clipped and fast, like the New World itself. Some spoke of specific and certain evils. Some lived in tight-lipped and cheerful denial. Others simply had no desire to relive what they had already left. The facts of their lives unfurled over the generations like an over-wrapped present, a secret told in syllables. Sometimes the migrants dropped puzzle pieces from the past while folding the laundry or stirring the corn bread, and the children would listen between cereal commercials and not truly understand until they grew up and had children and troubles of their own. And the ones who had half-listened would scold and kick themselves that they had not paid better attention when they had the chance.”

 

 “That’s why I preach today, Do not do spite,” he said. “Spite does not pay. It goes around and misses the object that you aim and comes back and zaps you. And you’re the one who pays for it.”

My Take

In The Warmth of Other Suns,  Pulitizer prize winning author Isabel Wilkerson thoroughly researched her seminal book on the black migration out of the Jim Crow south and is very informative about an often overlooked part of American history.  Her focus on three migrants of different socio-economic classes and their experiences helps bring the story to life and makes the experience much more relatable to the reader.