From the Bookshelf of Read Between the Wines…

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

Isabel Wilkerson

Start date: September 1, 2013

Finish date: September 30, 2013

Discussion: Book Club Discussions

Why we're reading this: This book was nominated by Jason.
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Apr 27, 2011 Jason rated it liked it

Shelves: wine-club, reviewed, for-kindle

This is going to sound a little weird, but throughout my reading of The Warmth of Other Suns, which is primarily about the migration of black Americans from the Jim Crow South to western and northern U.S. cities during a large portion of the 20th century, I kept thinking about my upper-middle-class white high school biology teacher, Mrs. Ferry. Mrs. Ferry had a pretty significant impact on the direction my life took—she was a vibrant older woman who demanded a lot from her students, and those qu This is going to sound a little weird, but throughout my reading of The Warmth of Other Suns, which is primarily about the migration of black Americans from the Jim Crow South to western and northern U.S. cities during a large portion of the 20th century, I kept thinking about my upper-middle-class white high school biology teacher, Mrs. Ferry. Mrs. Ferry had a pretty significant impact on the direction my life took—she was a vibrant older woman who demanded a lot from her students, and those qualities, combined with her sudden death mid-year, sparked my lifelong interest in science. But one of the things I’ll always remember about her is a single conversation we had about her experiences living in Alabama in the 1950s. She talked about segregation and inequality, about economic disparity, and about the brutal examples of injustice she had witnessed personally. I listened to everything she said, but being a 15 year-old at the time, I wasn’t able to completely assimilate those horrors or understand what kinds of long-term effects Jim Crow would have on the black people who lived under its harsh rule. So in many ways, this book filled in some of the gaps for me.

If nothing else, Isabel Wilkerson is thorough. She covers the exodus of blacks from the Deep South beginning with the First World War right up through the end of the Civil Rights Movement, and even slightly beyond (as its effects were not necessarily immediate in certain Southern strongholds). Because this pattern of migration lasted for several generations, it was difficult to “see it” while it was happening, and most of its participants were virtually unaware that they were part of any statistical shift in black American residency, but in the end, six million black people left the South during these years. And while Jim Crow is arguably the chief (and perhaps even the sole) reason for this migration, the backgrounds, experiences, and outcomes of these migrants ranged as widely as one might expect considering the movement’s longevity.

Wilkerson focuses on three biographies to describe the migration, each subject hailing from a different Southern state, each migrating in a different decade, and each carrying with him a different set of circumstances that factored into his decision to leave, yet they were all (spiritually) united in their desire to extricate themselves from a situation for which they saw no viable future. The move itself wasn’t easy for any of them, and often times the cities to which they migrated, while being free of government-sanctioned segregation, were still riddled with racism and injustice. Overall, this book did a lot to explain why some cities, and even some sections of those cities became predominantly black, and it was by no means a coincidence that they lay along primary railroad routes out of the South. More than that, it did a lot to explain how those from Georgia and Florida migrated mostly to Boston and New York, those from Alabama and Mississippi moved to cities like Detroit and Chicago, and those from Louisiana and Texas went to Los Angeles and other West Coast cities.

While the logistics of black migration are interesting, and I was reminded of how awful conditions were for those living in the Jim Crow South, not to mention the difficulties that persisted even for the ones who left, Wilkerson tended to repeat herself a great deal. And because she focused on the lives of the three migrants in particular, her story did not end with the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but continued following these characters’ lives, the trajectories of which would become more anecdotal in nature and less “representative” of their migrant generation, well into the 1990s. It is clear she became attached to these people emotionally, which is certainly not a bad thing, but it is what caused it to drag a bit for me, even though I ordinarily find myself more interested in the human interest aspect of history. Regardless, The Warmth of Other Suns is solidly researched and serves as an important tool for better understanding the trials and tribulations of black Americans in the 20th century, trials that are altogether human, yet which I had not otherwise been exposed to outside of my Rhode Island prep school upbringing. ...more

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Aug 31, 2013 Gary the Bookworm rated it liked it

“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”
― Richard Wright

Isabel Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and a daughter of the Great Migration, writes with conviction and passion. To tell us about the relocation of southern, mostly rural black people to ...more

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Jun 17, 2019 Becky rated it it was amazing

Unparalleled in execution and importance.

Though, I will say, it could've used a stronger hand at editing. There were a few times where almost mirror sentences were back to back, highly repetitive language that felt like the author was babysitting the reader, and a lot of duplicated narrative when the same story would come up later. Still, does not subtract from the content of the book which was fantastic. ...more

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Dec 14, 2011 Daniel rated it liked it

It was informative and gave an interesting view of a certain time and culture. I found the book to be a little too long. I would think that making it a story of just one person would cut back reading time although it could take away from the quality of the book overall.

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