The Warmth of Other Suns

This book captured me from its first pages, a history that reads like a novel. “They fled as if under a spell or a high fever,” Isabel Wilkerson writes, explaining the exodus from the South by oppressed African Americans.

As a writer, she drew me in by focusing on three people she came to know, who comprise the main story, providing an intimate window into the epic event. And didn’t they meet resistance and white supremacy in the North, too? Sadly, of course. I knew little about the Great Migration before and yet had learned much about the Harlem Renaissance,… show more.

This book made me shift my understanding of the great migration of Black Americans from the South to the North as a mass refugee movement. People fled violence, terrorism, and political corruption, seeking safety and the hope of a future.

I loved the first-person accounts of the decision to move, which made plain that the distinction between forced, politically motivated migration and voluntary, economically motivated migration is a construction of law, not lived experience. 

This New York Times bestselling book and Pulitzer Prize winner is an epic story of the American exodus from 1915 to 1970. Six million people sought the promise of the American Dream outside the segregated South, forever changing America’s demographics with their migration. This is a stunning historical text that is profound in its details and an incredible joy to read.

The people Wilkerson profiles through research and interview feel like family—an aunt, an uncle, a cousin—because many of us have heard stories of family migrating during that period. This book illuminates the joys and sorrows of those seeking to… show more.

I love digging into the corners of history that are under-explored or never taught in schools. Isabel Wilkerson’s book tells one such story: the Great Migration of almost six million black people from the American South to the north and west of the country from 1915 to 1970.

The author, a prize-winning journalist, did her homework, digging deeply into various sources. But rather than drowning the reader in data, she illuminates this very big story with stories of three individuals who left everything they knew to start fresh. The migration changed them and changed America.

Her approach was inspirational, and… show more.

Growing up, Marlene learned about the Holocaust through stories about members of her mother’s family who died in the Holocaust. As a Lutheran growing up in Minnesota, Fern learned little about the Holocaust. As whites, neither of us learned much about the Jim Crow era in the US or the northern migration of southern African Americans during that era.

Isabelle Wilkerson grew up knowing the stories of her parents’ migration north to Washington, DC. Those stories shaped her desire to chronicle the Great Migration (1915-1970), in which millions of African Americans left the Jim Crow South for better lives in… show more.

I cannot count the number of times I let out an audible, “My god,” reading this richly detailed account of the lives of three complicated and infinitely brave Black Americans who dared leave the Jim Crow South for cities North and West in the early-mid 1900s.

In school (in New England, not the South), I didn’t get an intimate sense of how routine and oppressive the violence and injustice were against southern Blacks during Jim Crow. And I certainly didn’t learn how, even in the “free” Northern cities, the subjugation continued, just in quieter ways.

Since reading the book, when… show more.

This may be the greatest creative nonfiction book written in my lifetime.

Drawing on hours and hours of recorded oral histories, Wilkerson dug into the history of the Great Migration like a casting agent picking the very best protagonists to tell the story. And so the work follows the lives three primary figures, Ida Mae Gladney, George Starling, and Robert Foster, as they move north to inhabit the Midwest, the Northeast, and the Pacific West.

This history of social mobility and race reads like an exciting adventure story, and it is stuff-full of genius storytelling, craft, and research. Lyric, deeply… show more.

I wrote my book because I heard a talk. Glen Asner of the Pentagon Historical Office spoke at a 2006 conference on the Societal Impact of Spaceflight. There, he championed the use of social history to interpret that impact.

Social history was once derided as “pots and pans” history, he said. Instead, it should be harnessed to tell the story of NASA employees who used “their equal status within a federal institution to reshape local institutions and conceptions of race.” The Warmth of Other Suns unlocked the way to do that for me. It takes the stories of the millions… show more.

As a storyteller myself, I deeply appreciated Wilkerson’s approach to this incredibly researched saga of the great migration of African Americans from the Deep South to the promised land of the North and West from 1915 to 1970.

I thought I knew the effects of Jim Crow on formerly enslaved people. I thought I knew that discrimination and inequality continued to persist even in “free states.”

Wilkerson interwove the very personal stories of three different families suffering the insidious daily suppression of personhood under Jim Crow. As I began to understand the courage it took to uproot everything and join… show more.

I'd heard about this book for years and finally picked it up at a bookstore when I did a signing. It is amazing! This is the story of The Great Migration, how Blacks in the South slowly made their way north between roughly 1915 and 1970.

"Stories" is more accurate since each person made their own decision and their own way—though the author wisely focused, for the most part, on three very different people, why and how and what they found when they moved.

And "escaped" is more accurate since plantation owners often went to fatal lengths to prevent the… show more.