Isabel Wilkerson, "The Warmth of Other Suns"

Between 1915 and 1970, about 6 million black Americans migrated out of the south to cities in the north or on the west coast. Demographers call this the Great Migration, and it was a big, powerful, and very important event. The Warmth of Other Suns (2010) is a wonderful book about it.

The Warmth of Other Suns has four interleaving elements. There is, first of all, a general narrative of the event, drawn from demographic, sociological and historical studies. That general narrative is made specific through the lives of three migrants who represent the three main flows that made up the movement: from Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas to the northeast, from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago, and from Texas and Louisiana to the west coast. Ida Mae Gladney was a sharecropper's daughter who moved from Mississippi to Chicago in 1937. George Starling moved from Florida to New York City in 1943, where he found a job working on the New York to Florida trains that had carried him north along with a million others. Robert Foster was a physician who left Louisiana for Los Angeles in 1953, where he eventually became a celebrity surgeon and big-time gambler who could stay and eat free at any casino in Las Vegas; after he repaired damaged tendons in Ray Charles' hand, Charles wrote a song about a doctor named Foster stealing his girlfriend that was a big hit in 1962.

The migration began during World War I, when manufacturers, cut off from immigrant flows – migration from Europe fell by 90% during the war – and needing to ramp up production sent agents to travel through the south recruting sharecroppers to come north and work. Southern planters were so alarmed by this threat to their labor supply that they passed crazy laws against the recruiters, some imposing fines of up to $10,000 for enticing laborers to leave the state and others requiring a recruiting license that would cost up to $75,000. But word spread anyway, and half a million blacks moved north between 1916 and 1920. Many people expected that the movement would die down after the war, but instead it accelerated, and it never really slackened until after the passing of the Civil Rights Act and the mechanization of agriculture gave southern blacks hope that their lives might improve at home.

Active recruiting by northern companies only happened during the World Wars. What kept the migration going the rest of the time was ties of kin and neighborhood between folks in the south and those already set up in the north. People kept moving to wherever the first people to leave their district had ended up; one sociologist noted that every person who had gone north from one South Carolina county went to Philadelphia. One Mississippi county sent hundreds of people to Beloit, Wisconsin. People in big cities like Chicago or Los Angeles formed clubs with people from their own towns or districts, like the Monroe, Louisiana club in LA that endured into the 1990s.

To me one of the most interesting themes of the book is the relationship between individual choice and social change. Wilkerson asked many migrants, starting with her own mother, if they were aware that they were part of a major national movement. Did knowing that millions of blacks were moving to the north influence their own choices? All said no, her mother quite indignantly. To them these were personal choices made for narrow, personal reasons. For Ida Mae it was bound up with her choice of husband, which fell on a man determined to move north over another suitor who stayed in Mississippi and was still a farmer in the 1970s. In 1943 George Starling had been organizing pickers in the orange groves to demand higher wages during the wartime labor shortage when a friend tipped him off that a group of growers might be planning to have him killed. To him, there was no choice, just a flight out of the county in the dark of the night. Robert Foster had the kind of dreams that drove millions of people from small towns to the big city, dreams of hitting the big time and being somebody, with a Cadillac and flashy clothes and capital R Respect from everybody around him.

And yet they added up to a mass movement. 

How this happens is, I think, the key question of sociology. One of the causes of the Great Migration was certainly Jim Crow. Many, many people told interviewers that they went north to "breathe free" or "live like men," and plenty of others fled from assaults or threats. Sociologists think, although this has been hard to prove, that the departure rate increased whenever there was a lynching in the county. The promise of higher wages was certainly another cause.

One of the Wilkerson's themes is that the Great Migration was much like the migrations from Europe and Mexico to the US, and that migrants to the north lived through some of the same patterns as migrants from outside the US. But the migrants themselves, she discovered, hated this kind of thinking; they were Americans, and they resisted any comparison between themselves and Irish or Mexican migrants.

There is too much in The Warmth of Other Suns for any summary to do it justice. Wilkerson covers the real estate wars of the 1960s and 1970s – Ida Mae Gladney bought a house in a mostly white neighborhood of Chicago only to have all of her new white neighbors leave within a few months – the rise of drugs and crime in northern cities, the slow fading of Jim Crow barbarism in the south, and much more. The amount of research behind this book is simply staggering. Wilkerson says she interviewed 1200 people, and I believe her. Her interviews with her three main subjects must have added up to hundreds of hours; she lived with her subjects (by then all elderly), drove them to their medical appointments, met their families, attended their Thanksgiving dinners. She interviewed their friends and co-workers, went to their home towns to check on their recollections, verified every verifiable claim with newspaper stories, birth and death certificates, and whatever other records she could find.

I think the great acclaim this book has received (second on the NY Times best books of the century list) comes from the positive story it tells about the black migration. Much of this story will make black readers proud: the defiance of segregation, the determination to live free, the humanity and dignity of Wilkerson's subjects. But to me the most moving part of the book came at the end, where Wilkerson chronicles the final illnesses, deaths and funerals of the three people she had befriended. These were good deaths, people who were surrounded by friends and kin, who were members of churches where people gathered to mourn them with full ceremony. And yet they overwhelmed me with sadness. It seemed to me that in the face of death, the whole story shifted; does it matter where we live out our short times on earth? Whether we work in offices or cotton fields? Whether we can vote? I would say that it does matter, but I do not know how I would refute an argument that says it does not. The shadow of death is deep and dark, and the way decay slowly overwhelms our bodies, stripping from us one thing after another that we fought and struggled for, has an awesome and awful finality.

I give The Warmth of Other Suns my highest recommendation, but if you are uncomfortable with intimate recountings of death you might want to stop before the end.