A very interesting study of the Great Migration in which huge numbers of poor coloured people left the Deep South and moved North between 1915 and 1970. This book uses first person testimony to explore the motivation and the changes that happened to American society as a result of this freedom of movement. The book is long but ultimately rewarding

This is such an engaging and accessible book, a fascinating read from the beginning to the end. This looks at the migration of black people in America beginning at the start of the twentieth century through to the 60s , escaping the south to northern and western cities. For what historians refer to as the great migration, it’s not actually covered enough, like most black history in the US and UK it’s kept hidden by white privilege. I chose this ARC as part on my ongoing self education and although I knew a bit, basic details about the migration, this book was in depth and a personal approach, I found it engrossing, I particularly enjoyed each different perspective and the insight it brings to the reader. It’s hard to emphasise enough how important, how engrossing, how moving and interesting this book, this history of humanity is. All I can say is pick it up and read it, improve and learn and make your education better, this is an interesting and a worthy read to anyone who is considering it, you won’t regret your choice.

Thanks to netgalley and the publisher for a free copy for an honest opinion

In this book, Isabel Wilkerson describes the mass migration over several decades of the 20th century from the Jim Crow south to the northern and western cities of the United States. The migration was of black people, individuals and families, determined to escape the inequality and harshness of their living and working conditions.

Three individuals are profiled in detail - Ida Mae Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Pershing Foster. All had different reasons for leaving when they did and all hoped for a better standard of living for themselves and their children, present and future.

The statistics at times make mind-boggling reading, throwing up numbers in the millions that have, until this book, remained largely unknown. The Great Migration began during World War One and was still happening in the 1960s.

The migrants had to compete with immigrants from Eastern Europe and blacks who already lived in the North. Just moving by itself didn't guarantee a rose-coloured future and inequalities still reared their heads.

Ida Mae fared best because of her naturally warm disposition, devotion to her family, and refusal to be anything but herself. Moving to Chicago from Mississippi, she found work in a hospital. Her positive outlook enabled her to live into her nineties.

George Starling married in haste when young and repented at leisure. He was forced to flee north to New York by his outspoken nature; however, his work travelling up and down the eastern seaboard railway lines enabled him to retain contact with his family in Florida.

Robert Foster was ambitious to better himself, marrying into an affluent and well-connected Louisianan family. As a doctor working in Los Angeles, he eventually became personal physician to the singer Ray Charles. He was determined to be noticed, and lived and dressed flamboyantly.

I was fascinated by the detail of these stories, the humanity of all three of these people, and their determination to forge a better future.

For anyone wishing to learn more about American social history and, in particular, the way in which black people took charge of their own futures, this is a compelling read.

I was sent an advance review copy of this book by Penguin Press UK, in return for an honest appraisal.

Simply put: this book is brilliant. Wilkerson does a great job of evoking the plight of the African-Americans on American soil. Ida Mae, George and Robert's stories really come to life and one cannot stop suffering along side them, but also be happy for their accomplishments and be motivated by their courage in the face of adversity.
I found interesting how Wilkerson has written such a long book without once pointing the finger. Of course we are all aware who the culprits are, but she strives to present us with a rather objective picture of the events which in my view it's even more powerful!

How is it even possible to do this book justice simply with my words? This is an epic, masterful, carefully researched telling of the Great Migration of Black people from the South to North US in the 20th century, focusing on three people who all fled the South at different times - Ida Mae, George Starling and Robert Foster. Wilkerson tells their stories from childhoods growing up with their families in the South, to the new lives they created in the North, with lots of fascinating information about the logistics of these migrations and what was happening in the US throughout these times punctuating their stories.
It’s hard to get to grips with these truths, especially growing up in a time and place where the idea of lynchings and segregation seems so alien to me - but that is precisely why this is such necessary reading, so we never commit these horrific crimes against people simply because of our differences. I cried so many times whilst reading this - for the children brutally attacked for looking at a White woman the wrong way, for the men and women hurting so much from picking cotton all day, and mostly, for those who made the treacherous journey North expecting to be treated equally only to find that it was just as cruel as the South.
This is a story that needed to be told, and I can’t imagine anyone handling it as well as Wilkerson - it’s honest, compelling, and harrowing but still offers glimpses of hope and the kind of resilience and strength which I can’t even begin to imagine. I will be getting a copy for everyone I know - absolutely essential reading and one of the most important books I’ve read this year.

Having read and thoroughly enjoyed Wilkerson's newest book 'Caste', I went in search of more of her work and 'The Warmth of Other Suns' did not disappoint. Through the stories of Ida Mae Gladney, Robert Foster and George Starling, Wilkerson charts the history of The Great Migration which, between 1915 and 1970, saw millions of black people leave their homes in the south of the US in hopes of a better life in the country's northern states. Wilkerson's writing style is well suited to humanizing history and, as with 'Caste', in this book she evokes empathy by bringing the story of The Great Migration to the level of the individual reminding us that it was families, married couples, young men and young women leaving behind everything they knew who ultimately made up the masses who headed north.

Following Ida Mae , Robert and George - who each travelled north in different decades - Wilkerson charts the three main routes used for the journey and sets out the different challenges and experiences that met black migrants who made it to the 'promised land'. In reality, the north was not as free for black people as they were led to believe. The Jim Crow laws of the south were still present but harder to spot behind a thin outward veneer of politeness. When black Americans went north in search of the economic and political freedoms which should have been their birthright, they were confronted with a white population that wasn't always welcoming and northern-born black people who were not always pleased to see them either.

The Warmth of Other Suns is a hugely important work, it gives its three main subjects the space and time to explore their stories fully and in doing so allows the reader to get as close as we can, given our modern sensibilities, to the experiences black migrants would have had at the time. Getting to the north was not a panacea but it was for many black Americans the first time they were able to exercise any kind of agency. Wilkerson writes: "Despite the private disappointments and triumphs of any individual migrant, the Migration, in some ways, was its own point. The achievement was in making the decision to be free and acting on that decision, wherever that journey led them".

The book did at times linger too long on what I thought were minor details such as the food served at a party, the clothes people wore etc. which could make it feel overly long but the central premise and the human-centred approach to a mammoth subject was impressive and a pleasure to read. I am glad to have been able to share in the lives of the three brave individuals profiled in this book who made the brave decision to head into the unknown in search of a better future if not for themselves then, hopefully, for the generations that followed them.

The book title ‘The Warmth of Other Suns’ is a line written by the novelist Richard Wright (1908-1960) who wrote about the plight of being African-American, most notably in his novel Native Son (1940) and autobiography Black Boy (1945). It provides the opening to this book. A migrant from Mississippi, he set out on his journey in 1927 for Chicago.

Isabel Wilkerson is an American journalist and the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism. Both her parents were part of the migration North, as were many in the neighbourhood where she grew up. As a journalist she heard many stories of similar journeys and began to join the dots and see the bigger picture, which lead to the premise of this book.

Non-Fiction Personal Narrative

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration is a factual account of the little acknowledged great migration of African Americans out of the Jim Crow* Southern states of America, beginning after WW1 in 1915 continuing until the 1970’s, a long continuous diaspora that had a significant impact on families, their culture and connections between their new home and old.

Who or what is Jim Crow?

Jim Crow is an adjective used to describe a set of laws that southern states devised regulating every aspect of black people’s lives, solidifying the southern caste system, prohibiting even the most casual and incidental contact between the races. They would come to be known as the Jim Crow laws, though it is unknown who precisely Jim Crow was or if anyone by that name even existed.

One Woman’s Personal Journey to Accumulate & Document History

After fifteen years of research, studying many reports and papers and archives and conducting hundreds of interviews and journeys, Isabel Wilkerson decided to focus the narrative of this great flux of humanity, choosing three people who left over three decades, for different destinations. Their stories provide specific and heart felt accounts of their journey’s and the life they created.

"Historians would come to call it the Great Migration. It would become the biggest under-reported story of the twentieth century. It was vast. It was leaderless. It crept along so many thousands of currents over so long a stretch of time as to be difficult for the press truly to capture while it was underway."

The result of that research is this book documenting the experiences of those who are representative of the larger whole, essentially the defection of six million African Americans from the South to the North, the Midwest and the West, from 1915, World War I, until 1970 when the South began truly to change.

"What binds these stories together was the back-to-the-wall, reluctant yet hopeful search for something better, any place but where they were. They did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done."

A Historical Study

Intertwined with these personal narratives, Wilkerson shares historical facts, bringing together a history of the struggle of a vast group of American citizens who left their homes, their ancestral roots and memories for another part of the country where they hoped to find freedom and be treated as equals.

Though they would find opportunity, the search for equality would be somewhat illusory, the oppression taking a different form, the discrimination more clandestine, eventually erupting into the civil rights movement and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Three People from the South, Three Decades, Three Destinations

Of the three whose lives unfold in this gripping narrative, Ida Mae Brandon Gladney would leave first in the 1930’s and ultimately end up in Chicago; George Swanson Starling left in the 1940’s to live in New York and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster departed in the 1950’s headed for California.

Ida Mae Brandon Gladney

We meet Ida May in her hometown of Chickasaw County, Mississippi, in 1937, the wife of a sharecropper, working the land of a planter picking cotton. They were a young couple who worked hard and stayed out of trouble, who decide to leave after witnessing the terrible beating of a cousin, in a case of mistaken identity. Their vulnerability to false accusation was a catalyst to their decision to leave. The North was facing a labour shortage and actively recruiting workers from the South.

"Oftentimes, just to go away, is one of the most aggressive things that another person can do, and if the means of expressing discontent are limited, as in this case, it is one of the few ways in which pressure can be put." John Dollard, Yale Scholar

Ida Mae and her husband struggled initially to find work, reminding me of the many who waited, Bernice McFadden’s Harlan raised by his grandmother while his parents sought their fortunes in the North and in Not Without Laughter, Langston Hughes and his mother waited for his father to send for them.

Competing with other immigrant groups, the increased cost of living, raising a family, they persevered in continual determination to keep bettering their situation.

"She was the matriarch of her family. She was one of the wisest and most beautiful people I’ve ever met in my life. Doing this book changed me in so many ways. She had a way of – a kind of Zen perspective, if you can say – if you can imagine it, of accepting what was and recognizing what she couldn’t change, and moving on and not living in the past. And she was beloved by everyone who knew her."


George Swanson Starling

George held aspirations to further his education, doing well in school, but there was pressure on him to work in the orange groves like everyone else. He made a mistake that altered the course of his life, though not his underlying essence and ambition. Working in the fruit groves using his intelligence and ability to bring people together to collectively try and improve their wage, made his existence dangerous accelerating the need for him to leave.

"Jim Crow had a way of turning everyone against one another, not just white against black or landed against lowly, but poor against poorer and black against black for an extra scrap of privilege. George Starling left all he knew because he would have died if he had stayed."

He would leave Eustis, the interior citrus belt of Florida and take the twenty-three hour train ride up the Atlantic coast to New York alone, not knowing when he’d be able to send for his wife Inez. That set something of a precedent for their relationship, though it was a wound that went back further than her marriage, for ironically George would spend his working life away from home, riding the rails up and down the East Coast as a railway attendant.

Robert Pershing Foster

Robert was the youngest son in a family of high achievers from Monroe, Louisiana, his brother Madison a doctor, encouraged him to go into partnership, but Robert had other aspirations.

The only way that someone as proud and particular as Pershing could survive in the time and place he was in was to put his mind somewhere else. He grew up watching his parents exercise exquisite control over the few things they were permitted to preside over in life.

Through marriage and his profession he aimed higher and further than most and had high expectations of himself and others in consequence. A proud man, he drove his way to California in his Buick Roadmaster, taking a circuitous route to Nuevo Laredo on the Mexican border, satisfying his craving for adventure and for doing what he did in grandiose style. Unsure whether he could make it in Los Angeles, he drove to Oakland before making his decision.

"It was looking like Monroe, which was perhaps one reason why people from Monroe had gravitated there in the first place and made a colony for themselves. It was precisely what Robert was looking to get away from. It was not living up to his glamour vision of California. It felt as if he had driven all this way for the same place he had left. Los Angeles had seduced him. Oakland didn’t stand a chance."

The Structure, The Decades, The Fear, The Exodus, The Dream, The Reality

Though they leave in different decades, the narrative has been beautifully orchestrated to allow their stories to be read concurrently, so we learn about their circumstances in the South first, discover their personal motivations for leaving, their plans and then their departure. Each new section tells their three stories.

It’s a brilliant way to join the stories and see the mass migration for the terrifying, courageous yet exciting act it was. The departures, no matter which decade they were in, all carry within them an undercurrent of fear of the unknown, and it is with some relief that I recall I’m reading about people who will survive into old age, the danger surrounding their life-changing departure palpable nevertheless.

The stories are rich with detail and anecdote, the historical references are eye-opening and important to acknowledge. It is an excellent book, a thorough examination of the movement of people out of oppression towards equality, rights that continue to be fought for today. It’s impossible to do justice to the book, both it’s humanity and history, it’s an astounding accomplishment and well worth reading.

"We cannot escape our origins, however hard we might try, those origins contain the key – could we but find it – to all that we later become." James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

Isabel Wilkerson’s new book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is published on August 11.

Have you read any novels that incorporate a character making this migration out of the South? Do let me know in the comments below.

Further Reading

TED Talk by Isabel Wilkerson: The Great Migration and the Power of A Single Decision

New York Times: Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste is an instant American Classic about our abiding sin by Dwight Garner

Chicago Tribune: Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste is is about the strict lines that keep us apart — lines that are more than race or class

I wasn’t sure what to expect when i downloaded this book. I found it so informative and emotive. A personal history

A fascinating look at black immigration from the south to the north.The racism and hardship they left the hope they had for their new lives new world.So well written so engrossing perfect for class or book club discussions.An informative eye opening read.#netgalley #

My first proper read of black history events and I loved it! I thoroughly enjoyed learning about the characters journey and the role they played in history at that time. Will definitely be recommending this to fellow readers and those with an interest in black history.

Isabel Wilkerson gives all who read "The Warmth of Other Suns "a real service by applying a fresh perspective on The Great Migration in this excellent book. The Great Migration took place, largely between 1915 and 1970, during which period some 4 million black Americans fled the southern states to seek their fortune north of the Mason-Dixon line.
"They left to pursue some version of happiness, whether they achieved it or not. It was a seemingly simple thing that the majority of Americans could take for granted but the migrants and their forbears never had a right to in the world they fled" They simply wanted to be free - the right of every man.
In the course of researching this hugely important event Isabel Wilkerson interviewed some 1200 negros who made this journey North. From these she focussed in on three. Ida Mae Gladney from Mississippi, George Starling from Florida and Robert Foster from Louisiana. Ida moved via Minneapolis to Chicago in the 30's, George moved to Harlem in New York in the '40's and Robert moved to Los Angeles in the '50's. How they each got there, how their lives worked out and how they adapted to big city life is the central theme of this book. And it makes for enormously informative and emotive reading. Wilkerson, in parallel with this storyline, dispels many of the myths that have been attached to the Migration - such as the migrants diluting the standard of education and causing a rise in crime in the cities in which they settled. Also, she shines a bright light on the prejudice, sometimes vicious, shown by Northern black Americans to the incomers which further added to the problems of finding somewhere to settle if you were from the deep south. This work is to be commended for bringing to the fore the bravery and stoicism of this generation of migrants and putting their story in front of the 21st century reader. Not many authors succeed in combining scholarship, lucid argument and vivid writing in one book. Wilkerson does. Enjoy.

By no means a light read, this is still an utterly fascinating look at the migration of many black Americans who travelled from the South and more active, acrid prejudice, to the North and a different set of struggles. This is an important thread in world history and absolutely essential reading for an understanding of US society and history. Highly recommend.