The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerkson: A Review

Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration traces the lives of three migrants from the Deep South, to their lives in the North, over a span of multiple decades.

Wilkerson follows the lives of Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster as they grow up and then leave Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida, escaping from the throes of what amounts to different forms of indentured servitude. Not to mention the perils of white supremacy, including the possibility of lynching.

Early on Wilkerson plainly spells out the economic disadvantage of being black in America. “The disparity in pay, reported without apology in the local papers for all to see, would have far-reaching effects. It Would mean that even the most promising of colored people, having received next to nothing from their slave foreparents, had to labor with the knowledge that they were now being underpaid by more than half, that they were so behind it would be impossible to accumulate the assets their white counterparts could, and they would, by definition, have less to leave succeeding generations than similar white families. Multiplied over the generations, it would mean a wealth deficit between the races that would require a miracle windfall or near asceticism on the part of colored families if they were to have any chance of catching up or amassing anything of value. Otherwise, the chasm would continue, as it did for blacks as a group even into the succeeding century, dampening the economic prospects of the children and grandchildren of both Jim Crow and the Great Migration before they were even born.”

Wilkerson explains that the Great Migration she is writing about happened roughly between WWI and the early 1970s, during which time millions of Southern blacks took stock of their prospects and decided to head North.

Fairly soon after the Great Migration began, plantation owners felt the loss of their labor.

“Chastened by their losses, some businessmen tried conciliation, one delegation going so far as to travel to Chicago to persuade former sharecroppers that things had changed and it was time they came back. (The sharecroppers showed no interest and instead took the opportunity to complain about being cheated and whipped while in their employ.) In the 1920s, the Tennessee Association of Commerce, the Department of Immigration of Louisiana, the Mississippi Welfare League, and the Southern Alluvial Land Association all sent representatives north to try to bring colored workers back… They returned empty-handed.”

Wilkerson notes that “[T]he 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, deserts, and oceans or as far as it takes to reach safety with the hope that life will be better wherever they land.”

In discussing the reasons behind this mass movement of black folk, Wilkerson says it went beyond mere economics. “[M]any of them picked cotton not by choice but because it was the only work allowed them in the cotton-growing states. In South Carolina, colored people had to apply for a permit to do any work other than agriculture after Reconstruction. It would not likely have been their choice had there been an alternative.”

Simply put, it was a matter of extreme oppression resulting in an increasingly soul-crushing life of diminishing options.

As for the historical formation of inner-city ghettos, Wilkerson notes: “The story played out in virtually every northern city – migrants sealed off in overcrowded colonies that would become the foundation for ghettos that would persist into the next century. These were the original colored quarters – the abandoned and identifiable no-man’s lands that came into being when the least-paid people were forced to pay the highest rents for the most dilapidated housing owned by absentee landlords trying to wring the most money out of a place nobody cared about.”

Midway through The Warmth of Other Suns, Wilkerson speaks to the tension of life in such living conditions, bearing bitter fruit. “Contrary to modern-day assumptions, for much of the history of the United States – from the Draft Riots of the 1860s to the violence over desegregation a century later – riots were often carried out by disaffected whites against groups perceived as threats to their survival. Thus, riots would become to the North what lynchings were to the South, each a display of uncontained rage by put-upon people directed toward scapegoats of their condition.”

The irony of the situation was rich.

Isabel Wilkerson/Austin Chronicle

“Each outbreak pitted two groups that had more in common with each other than either of them realized. Both sides were made up of rural and small-town people who had traveled far in search of the American Dream, both relegated to the worst jobs by industrialists who pitted one group against the other. Each side was struggling to raise its families in a cold, fast, alien place far from their homelands and looked down upon by the earlier, more sophisticated arrivals. They were essentially the same people, except for the color of their skin.”

Even before the Great Migration began, the seeds for Northern ghettos were already there: “[M]any white neighborhoods began declining before colored residents even arrived… There emerged a perfect storm of nervous owners, falling prices, vacancies unfillable with white tenants or buyers, and a market of colored buyers who may not have been able to afford the neighborhood at first but now could with prices within their reach. The arrival of colored home buyers was often the final verdict on a neighborhood’s falling property value rather than the cause of it…

“The downward spiral created a vacuum that speculators could exploit for their own gain. They could scoop up properties in potentially unstable white neighborhoods and extract higher prices from colored people who were anxious to get in and were accustomed to being overcharged…”

Wilkerson highlights the frustration Martin Luther King, Jr. experienced in bringing his call for civil rights into the North; into Chicago. Unlike the South, this time King wasn’t battling against unjust laws, he was up against “the ill-defined fear and antipathy that made northern whites flee at the sight of a black neighbor, turn blacks away at realty offices, or not hire them if they chose. The ‘enemy’ was a feeling, a general unease that led to the flight of white people and businesses and sucked the resources out of the ghettos the migrants were quarantined into. No laws could make frightened white northerners care about blacks enough to permit them full access to the system they dominated.”

Within this foundation of the Great Migration, Wilkerson weaves the stories of Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster.

In the Epilogue of The Warmth of Other Suns, Wilkerson leaves us with the powerful impression that: “With the benefit of hindsight, the century between Reconstruction and the end of the Great Migration perhaps may be seen as a necessary stage of upheaval. It was a transition from an era when one race owned another; to an era when the dominant class gave up ownership but kept control over the people it had once owned, at all costs, using violence even; to the eventual acceptance of the servant caste into the mainstream…

Wilkerson concludes: “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 dream 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.”

Isabell Wilkerson is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize in journalism for her feature writing while the Chicago Bureau Chief of the New York Times. She is the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer in journalism. 

She spent fifteen years researching for The Warmth of Other Suns, interviewing 1,200 people.

Her own parents were part of the Great Migration, which ultimately included six million people.