It was vast. It was leaderless. It was an overground railroad.
Stars: 5/5
Pulitzer Prize winning author, Isabel Wilkerson, has penned a superb national bestseller on The Great Migration, the flight of African-Americans out of the Jim Crow South to the North where the racial temperament was less caustic. The Warmth of Other Suns is an immense work; part African-American history and part biography of three unrelated people who were participants in what Wilkerson called, “...the first mass act of independence..... to escape what might be considered a man-made pestilence...” (p.10, p.178)
The primary arc of the text follows the migration of three individuals: Ida Mae Gladney (from Mississippi to Illinois), George Swanson Starling (from Florida to New York) and Robert Pershing Foster (from Louisiana to California). But they were not alone, Wilkerson interviewed countless other African-Americans, including her own parents, who traversed the United States anywhere between the years of 1910 to the early 1970s.
Wilkerson has taken the oral histories and the extensive research and with deft writing has woven these threads into a vivid tapestry that is wonderfully engaging.
video source: BU Today: Telling America's Untold Story/Isabel Wilkerson
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