Isabel Wilkerson won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction last Thursday for The Warmth of Other Suns, a history of the Great Migration. This honor could not be more richly deserved. The Warmth is one of the most impressive books I've ever read.
The Great Migration was a massive exodus of black Southerners to Northern cities. Between 1915 and 1975 6 million people relocated. By the end of the Migration, nearly half of all black Americans were living in the North, compared to just 10 percent before the exodus began.
The Migration was so big, and went on for so long, that it eventually dwarfed the California Gold Rush, and even the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s. "But more remarkably, it was the first mass act of independence by a people who were in bondage in this country for far longer than they have been free," Wilkerson writes.
Historians have offered various theories to explain the Migration, but as Wilkerson sees it, the explanation is clear. Everyone had their own reasons for staying or going, but the bottom line was that people were moving to escape Jim Crow and everything that it entailed -- humiliation, material deprivation, constriction of life prospects, and the constant threat of violence.
The book spans a century. Wilkerson interviewed some 1,200 people, including her own mother. The book tells the stories of three unrelated main characters, each of whom took a different trajectory at a different point in the migration: George Swanson Starling, Ida Mae Gladney, and Robert Pershing Foster.
