We explore the overt and more subtle forms racism takes in the north, impacting employment, rents, home ownership, religion, and social life.We see the hostility greeting them from already-established black Americans, as well as from other ethnic immigrant groups.We witness both the new opportunities and new restrictions they encountered when arriving at “the promised land.”.We understand the family, community, and cultural connections travelers sacrificed when they headed north, and the deep hole left inside each one.Through these three narratives, representative of so many millions of others, and Wilkerson’s rich, supporting research, the author helps readers actually experience so many nuanced aspects of this migration: Robert Foster, a talented physician who married into Louisiana’s black elite, but had to travel to California and endure long separations from his family, before establishing the medical practice he craved.George Starling, a workers’ activist and the son of two educators, who was forced to flee Florida in 1945, ending up in Harlem.

Ida Mae Gladney, a poor sharecropper who left Mississippi in 1937, following her husband on the midwest railroad route taken by millions of others, ultimately landing in Chicago’s South Side.Wilkerson masterfully focuses on the journeys of three people: The result is nothing less than the demographic transformation of the United States.

Part drama, part history, and part sociology text, THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS skillfully tells a story of one hundred years of migration, when blacks left the untenable and unjust Jim Crow laws of the southern states and, much like other immigrants coming to this country during the same time period, traveled far looking for more and better opportunities. And I certainly never before understood that, after the Civil War, the lives of freed blacks in the South actually became worse than they had been under slavery. But I never fully understood the daily impact racism has on every aspect of life of a black American, until I read this book. I’m not sure I’ve ever used this word to describe ANY book I’ve read, but it’s TRANSFORMATIVE! No wonder she received a Pulitzer Prize!īefore reading THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS, I thought I had a reasonable, liberal, white person’s understanding of the pervasive nature of racism in the United States. If I could give this book SIX stars, I would.

The warmth of other suns review