The Warmth of Other Suns

Isabel Wilkerson’s “The Warmth of Other Suns” is a landmark work of narrative history about the Great Migration, the roughly six-million-person movement of Black Americans out of the South between 1915 and 1970. Wilkerson frames that exodus as an unsung migration comparable to other great movements of people, and she builds the book around three real protagonists whose lives trace its different routes: Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a Mississippi sharecropper’s wife who left for Chicago; George Swanson Starling, a Florida fruit picker who fled to New York; and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, a Louisiana doctor who drove to Los Angeles. Their stories anchor the book’s three geographic arcs and its long timeline. Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, reported the book over more than a decade, drawing on hundreds of interviews and archival research. She intersperses the three biographies with chapters that supply historical context, covering the sharecropping and Jim Crow systems migrants escaped, the terror of lynching and debt peonage, the mechanics of departure by train, bus, and car, and the reception awaiting newcomers in northern and western cities. A recurring theme is that the migration was not simply an economic choice but a flight from caste-like racial oppression, and that it reshaped American music, politics, labor, and urban life even as migrants faced housing segregation, police hostility, and homesickness. The title comes from a phrase in Richard Wright’s “Black Boy.” Wilkerson’s central argument is that the Great Migration was a decisive, self-directed act of agency by ordinary people, not a passive demographic shift, and that its consequences remain embedded in American cities and families today. The book won the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction and the 2011 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.