What’s more – they are all somehow connected. What she’s achieved here is a truly remarkable feat that brings together individual experiences and paints a picture of the Great Migration from the ground up. Isabel Wilkerson weaves this enormous oral history project based on hundreds of interviews, each recorded over dozens (some, hundreds) of hours.
The escape to the North is courageous as it is risky, steeped in the hope of a better future for the central characters and their children. The historical work does not gloss over the harsh conditions and the graphic detail of racism that plagued the South. African Americans moved from the rural South to cities in the North in droves between 19 with increasing numbers each decade.
I listened to it over several months, immersed in the journeys and the reflections on the legacies of each of the characters. This is a mammoth non-fiction audio book at 22 hours which takes the listener through the period of ‘The Great Migration’ in the USA through the lens of three main figures. Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country journeys, as well as how they changed their new homes forever.Įxcellent listen for charting the Great Migration With stunning historical detail, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson gives us this definitive, vividly dramatic account of how these journeys unfolded.īased on interviews with more than 1,000 people and access to new data and official records, The Warmth of Other Suns tells the story of America's Great Migration through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall and finally found peace in God and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career, becoming the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career.
From the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this is one of the great untold stories of American history: the migration of Black citizens who fled the south and went north in search of a better life.įrom 1915 to 1970, an exodus of almost six million people would change the face of America.
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