The Warmth of Other Suns

“He was getting away from all that now. He looked out at the lights and the billboards. The driver announced that they were passing out of Mississippi and into Tennessee. He was out for sure now and on his way to Illinois, and at that moment he could feel the sacks of cotton dropping from his back… ‘It was like getting unstuck from a magnet,’ he said.” –The Warmth of Other Suns, p. 221

Essential points: The stories of three central figures anchor the sweeping history chronicled in The Warmth of Other Suns. Through cradle-to-grave narration of the lives of Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, the award-winning journalist Wilkerson crafts a comprehensive account of the Great Migration without veering into the academic or theoretical. Gladney, Starling, and Foster, strangers to one another, each left the U.S. South at different times and for different immediate reasons (though all motivated at their root by the South’s oppressive racism), making their way to different cities in the North and West. Disparate as they may be, the three stories are skillfully woven together along with poems, quotes, stories of other migrants, and macro commentary on both the culture of the U.S. historically and the ways in which the Great Migration has been framed and discussed since it occurred. This is history as it should be told: through the eyes of the people who lived it, transparently framed by the perspective of the present day. Subjects this book includes that some readers may be sensitive to (but which others will be thrilled to find sensitively discussed in their literature): racism, lynching and other forms of murder, drug use, gambling, racialized violence.