Both were huddled masses, yearning to breathe free, with one critical difference: black migrants were already citizens. Ironically, the early black migrants were converging on the interior Ellis Islands of the North and Midwest (New York, Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, etc.), just as oppressed Europeans were converging on the same cities. They’re all reflected in The Warmth of Other Suns, Wilkerson’s sweeping history of the Great Migration.Īs Wilkerson notes, America’s greatest domestic movement began around 1917 and ended in 1975, an epoch during which millions of black American citizens fled Southern towns and cities, with their elaborate and complicated tapestries of Jim Crow laws, for the relative freedoms of the north. The exits occurred for various reasons: the desire to escape the near-starvation of tenant farmer existences the need to leave because their own prospects were so restricted, and they wanted more for their children the middle of the night departures because a son had not been deferential enough to an outraged white townsman the vaporization of an entire family overnight, because their pretty eldest daughter had attracted the lingering glance of a white man she would not be allowed to refuse, with dire consequences to her entire family. Reading Isabel Wilkerson is like hearing the stories of my parents’ friends and their parents, the handed-down (and often sanitized) tales of their exodus from the South.

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration

From the warmth of other suns