For 70,000 years or more, homo sapiens has been on the move. First, within Africa, when changing climate forced whole communities to move across the continent. Then, when a venturesome few slipped across the land bridges joining Africa and Asia to begin our species’ dispersal throughout the globe. From hunter-gatherers fleeing their enemies or in search of virgin territory, to waves of refugees escaping war or oppression, we have struck out into the unknown in search of stability and opportunity for ourselves and our children. And we’ve never stopped moving. Refugees have shaped our history. Yet in the United States one of the most significant movements of people in our history has escaped notice outside academic circles. In the Great Migration, six million African Americans moved from the Jim Crow South to the North and West. And in Isabel Wilkerson the Great Migration has found its poet. Her award-winning book, The Warmth of Other Suns, gives this historic migration its due.
Why has this historic movement escaped notice?
It’s not hard to understand why only scholars have recognized the Great Migration for what it was. Unlike today’s flows of refugees from war, oppression, or climate change, the movement of American Blacks unfolded slowly. It took place over the six decades from World War I to the end of the Vietnam War. And those who participated in it rarely if ever recognized that their move was part of something larger, as Wilkerson demonstrates so clearly. She builds her book around the lives of three exemplary individuals, all of whom stoutly reject the notion that they were part of something historic. And in the decade-long research that preceded the book’s publication, she interviewed countless others. Not one saw their role as historic. Yet the Great Migration has profoundly shaped the nation’s history, giving birth to the reformist New South and the prominence of African Americans in our greatest cities today.
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson (2010) 637 pages ★★★★★
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
Three strands of the story
Wilkerson took her time choosing her subjects. In interviews spanning the years from the mid-1990s through the first decade of the 21sr century, she spoke with thousands of individuals whose lives had been shaped by the Great Migration. Some had themselves moved north or west. Others were their children, their neighbors, or their friends, either back home in the South or where they settled. In the end, she settled on three individuals to illustrate some of the principal aspects of the historic movement.
- Ida Mae Gladney, who had picked cotton in Mississippi and migrated to Chicago in 1937
- George Starling, whose two years of college didn’t save him from picking fruit in the citrus groves of Florida and ultimately forced him to move to New York City in 1945
- Robert Pershing Foster, a physician and surgeon blocked from professional opportunities in Louisiana who left for Los Angeles in 1953
As you can see, each of the three took a different route out of the South during a critical period in our history. From the South to the Midwest during the Great Depression. From Florida north along the Atlantic coastal route at the close of World War II. And from small-town Louisiana westward to California the year before Brown v. Board of Education, as the civil rights movement was a-borning.
Wilkerson’s account consists of biographical sketches of these three extraordinary people from cradle to grave, interspersed with historical and sociological commentary drawn from scholarly studies, press accounts, oral histories, diaries, and other sources as well as her interviews. Other names surface as well, some famous, some unknown to history, But the author doggedly sticks to her three subjects, and she does so with a novelist’s sensibilities, observing them in three dimensions. The result is a triumph.
About the author
Journalist Isabel Wilkerson shot to national prominence with the publication of The Warmth of Other Suns. The book was a New York Times bestseller and has racked up hundreds of thousands of copies sold since its publication in 2010. (Few nonfiction books sell even 1,000 copies.) The Warmth of Other Suns won numerous awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award. As of 2025, Amazon still listed it as #2 in Race & Ethnicity Studies and #3 in Black & African American History.
Wilkerson began her career in journalism at Howard University, where she was editor of the college newspaper. She went on to a series of distinguished posts, including that of Chicago Bureau Chief for the New York Times. There, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. She has also been a professor of journalism at Emory, Princeton, Northwestern, and Boston Universities.
Wilkerson was born in Washington, DC, in 1961. She has been married twice.
For related reading
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