Isabel Wilkerson
Isabel Wilkerson, who spent most of her career as a national correspondent and bureau chief at The New York Times, is the first Black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism. Inspired by her own parents’ migration, she devoted fifteen years to the research and writing of this book. She interviewed more than 1,200 people, unearthed archival works and gathered the voices of the famous and the unknown to tell the epic story of the relocation of an entire people in The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.
In a beautifully told story of hope and longing, three young people set out from the American South during different decades of the 20th Century en route to the North and West. Their stories are interwoven with those of six million African-Americans who fled the South during what would become known as the Great Migration.
It is the story of how the northern cities came to be, of the music and culture that might not have existed had the people not migrated, and about the consequences of their migration and the courage necessary to make those moves.
From an interview on Democracy Now!, Amy Goodman interviews Isabel Wilkerson:
AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to a pivotal but largely overlooked event in American history: the mass migration of African Americans from the South to the North and West of the country. Some six million Black citizens left the South during the period of the Great Migration, which began around 1915 and continued into the 1970s . . . Why did they leave?
ISABEL WILKERSON: They left because they wanted to be able to have better opportunities. They left because they were living under a caste system, which dictated and controlled every aspect of the lives of African Americans. In some ways I describe it as a defection as much as it was a migration. In many ways, they were seeking political asylum from a caste system that determined, for example, that in Birmingham, for example, a Black person and a White person couldn’t play checkers together. Someone actually sat down and wrote that out as a law. There were places—there were courtrooms in the South where there was actually a black Bible and a white Bible to swear to tell the truth on.
AMY GOODMAN: You begin your book with the words of Richard Wright. Can you read them?
ISABEL WILKERSON: Yes, and I preface it by saying that, in some ways, it speaks to anyone who’s ever left one place that . . . they’ve known all their lives for a place they’ve never seen. It speaks to the immigrant heart, and it reads, ‘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.’
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