Jandos Rothstein
In The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson argues that the African Americans caught up in the flood of the Great Migration never escaped the specter of segregation. Once free of the de jure segregation of Eustis or Monroe, migrants were confronted with the de facto segregation of Chicago and New York. Yet, even when discussing America’s disparate systems of oppression, Wilkerson never fails to maintain a core of unity, reminding her readers that both the North and South were part of an apparatus meant to systematically strip opportunity away from African Americans.
By allowing the Great Migration to unfold through the eyes of those who lived it, Wilkerson weaves together three intricate narratives, bound together by a single common thread: fear. This fear, the constant companion of racism and discrimination, permeates the book, follows Ida Mae Gladney and George Starling and Robert Foster from their homes in the “Old Country” into the “Promised Land.” For African Americans in the South, it is the fear of the white ruling class, a fear sharpened by white violence and Jim Crow into the bedrock of the racial caste system. For white people of the North, it is the fear of African Americans, a fear responsible for triggering white flight, job discrimination, and housing segregation.
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, by Isabel Wilkerson
In the complex cycle of racism, fear, and discrimination, one idea clearly emerges; the market offers no aid for African Americans. Jim Crow reigned supreme in the South for decades, side by side with private discrimination in the North, and all the while the market presided silently over the terror beaten into black families, the humiliation endured by black workers, and the poverty inflicted on black sharecroppers. As the tool of those in power, the market was either manipulated to ensure the continual failure of every nonwhite group, or discarded entirely, the economic loss an acceptable cost to ensure Black servitude.
The most glaring failure of the market to protect the economic and political freedom of African Americans was its inability to safeguard vulnerable groups from violence. In fact, the suffering and fear of African Americans was the heartsblood of the Southern economic system, a system constructed to maximize white power and extract profit from Black bodies. In taking an unflinching look at Southern brutality, Wilkerson delves into a procession of lynchings and mob killings—from the torture of farmhand Claude Neal, accused of killing a white woman, to the beating of Joe Lee, wrongly suspected of stealing a white planter’s chickens. For Black people, the South was a maze of land mines, with white violence striking suddenly, punishing any slight infraction of the social code.
This blend of arbitrary violence and forced Black deference was a hallmark of the sharecropping system, which sought to give white planters almost complete power over their Black sharecroppers. Ida Mae and her husband were sharecroppers with “nothing to keep a planter from cheating his sharecropper” out of payment because sharecroppers were too afraid of violent retribution to tell the planter he had miscalculated the annual expenses. As a result, white planters were free to add additional debts and expenses to their sharecroppers’ tabs, leaving only one-fifth of Black sharecroppers able to “break even.” Thus, white Southern profit was an engine powered by violence and oiled with the fear-induced silence of African Americans.
The North was little better; while violence was not as essential to the economy as it was for the
South, which needed blood like a fire needs oxygen, whites of the receiving cities of the Great Migration used force to maintain segregation. After the Black Clark family attempted to move into the all-white town of Cicero, they found their new apartment burned and looted by the town’s residents, whose fear and bigotry encouraged them to ignore the reality of the economy. The “violent defense of white neighborhoods” was the culmination of an “economic fear” that Black intrusion into white areas would cut property values, although it was the “fear and tension” nurtured by white people that slashed housing prices. Yet white people would point to the downward spiral of the housing market to justify barricading themselves against Black people, enforcing a form of hypersegregation based on a scapegoat readily provided by the economy. Of course, the victims of this white hysteria were African Americans; landlords, seizing on the opportunity to profit from racist fear, charged new Black tenants considerably more than the recently departed white tenants, knowing their renters would have little choice but to accept the elevated rates.
Wilkerson’s dissection of the market and its weaknesses is only one facet of her denunciation of the American dream, a dream that is a beautiful illusion at best, a monstrous lie at worst. By following George Starling’s life from Eustis to New York, Wilkerson exposes the dream as a hollow facade. Starling’s experiences shatter the pillars of the dream—the certainty that a good education and hard work guarantees material success. Starling was one of the few Black men who attended college, yet he spent decades working jobs far below his intellectual capacity, first as an orange grove picker in the South and later as a rail worker in the North. Starling’s experience is a microcosm of how, despite the lack of legal segregation, the Northern job market was biased against black job seekers; white workers demanded their employers not hire Black employees, forcing African Americans to seek the most dangerous, menial, and unsanitary jobs. Worse, none of Starling’s work filtered back to him as a good wage; it was a “buyer’s market in the picking world,” and each picker was dispensable and replaceable, making unionization or strikes impossible. With all the power in the hands of the grove owners, Starling was only paid enough during wartime, when the pickers finally had enough leverage to coax higher wages out of the grove owners. For Starling and millions of other African Americans, the dream was killed by a toxic blend of racism and economic misfortune.
Like Starling, Ida Mae also struggled with her job due to the intersection of prejudice and a poor economy. When she arrived in Chicago at the height of the Great Depression, tensions flaring between white and Black Americans had already curtailed opportunities for minorities as businesses paid ever lower wages for African Americans. Worse, as a woman, Ida Mae experienced an even harsher level of discrimination because many businesses either subjected prospective female employees to ridiculously tight requirements or refused to hire women altogether. Some Black women resorted to hiring themselves out in “slave markets,” where white housewives would bid on their services. Though Ida Mae escaped the degradation of those markets, she still experienced abuse. When she first began working as a maid for a wealthy white family, the man of the house expected sex from her. Her story is proof that the North was no more accepting than the South, subjecting Black women to experiences mirroring how white men in the South could take the bodies of Black women with impunity.
The racism Ida Mae found in the North also chased Robert Foster across the country to the West, where he began a new life steeped in indignity and unexpected bigotry. Even during his journey out of the South, Foster faces a form of segregation that is “defined by custom and whites’ discomfort” and acts as a terrible constricting presence in Black communities, though it slides out of focus once examined through the lens of the law. While in Monroe, hotels and diners were clearly labeled with signs of “whites only,” the motels dotting the road winding westward were ruled by an unspoken understanding to refuse African American customers. When Foster believes he is “a safe distance from the South,” he attempts to rent a room for the night, but is “sweetly” rejected from three separate motels, each of which provides a weak excuse to turn him away. Eventually, he discovers the reason; any motel daring to admit a Black person would be “ostracized” from the rest of the motel owners, a social circle built on the exclusion of another race.
For Foster, conditions did not improve when he finally arrived in Los Angeles. He encounters Black patients who refuse to see him, preferring instead to go to white doctors. In the West, white superiority is so ingrained in the social order that Black people have internalized perceptions of their own inferiority. From there, Foster encounters a litany of humiliations based on the color of his skin. Barred from white social spheres—golfing or gambling in Las Vegas—he can only listen as his white colleagues discuss their weekends in places he cannot go. When he attempts to buy a dream apartment, he finds it has mysteriously been rented to another tenant. Even at the height of his career, as a physician at the prestigious West Los Angeles Veterans Administration Medical Center, he is still not safe from de facto segregation. His rosy career is immediately put under scrutiny when a white woman complains about his examinations; he is accused of professional incompetence and moved into an older building with a cramped office. Ultimately, the stress of the situation forces him into retirement after he suffers a heart attack.
The story of the Great Migration is epic, saturated with hardship and extraordinary resilience. Yet, by traveling northward or westward, the migrants documented by Wilkerson failed to free themselves of segregation. Though no statute mandated Black inferiority, individual acts of bias and discrimination collectively created a culture of white supremacy and Black disempowerment. The Warmth of Other Suns is a stark reminder that all forms of segregation, even those not written into law, are monstrous.
