Category: I began reading this book in August of last year. I took a break from reading it because of all the reading I had to do for an art history class I took in the fall. But I went back to it after the class was over.
My thoughts: In short, this book is awesome and a great reading experience. The Warmth of Other Suns is a super-comprehensive look at the Great Migration. This was a period in the 20th century when Southern blacks migrated to Northern and Western cities. The book is part history lesson and part sociology lesson and mainly focuses on the stories of three people: Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, and George Starling. Ida Mae, her husband, and children decided to say good-bye to Mississippi after a relative was beaten nearly to death and, as was par for the course, no legal action could be taken. Robert Foster left Louisiana to move to California and realize his full potential as a surgeon. George Eastman left Florida and moved to New York to escape a “necktie party” (i.e., a lynching) as potential retribution for trying to get orange grove workers to organize. Interspersed among these stories are facts about the Great Migration and vignettes about others whose lives were touched by it, like basketball great Bill Russell and Wilkerson’s own mother.
Our protagonists learned that their troubles did not end once they left the South. Robert Foster’s journey to California alone proved to him that discrimination did not end once he left Southern borders, and he endured a arduous journey through the West, where he could not find a hotel that would allow him to stay there for the night, and thus was awake and driving for an ungodly amount of time. Ida Mae witnessed white flight and the formation of the inner city in Chicago, where there were instances of sometimes brutal resistance to a black family moving into an all-white neighborhood. George Starling had escaped a lynching that brought down many of his brethren in the South, but had to endure demoralizing discrimination in the North—he could go into a bar in Penn Station and have a drink, but the bartender would break the glass when he finished his drink rather than reuse it. George’s family was also touched by the growing problem of drug addiction in the inner city. This lesson of the less-than-stellar side of the migration reminded me of A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry, Richard Wright’s Native Son, and the beloved TV show Good Times (all set in Chicago—one of the Great Migration’s receiving stations).
The Warmth of Other Suns illuminates a movement in history that has received too little attention, but has affected the lives of so many—and the United States itself. The book reminded me of Bound for Canaan, Fergus Bordewich’s work about the Underground Railroad and another comprehensive look at ordinary people who slowly created change in America.
Great passage: They had gone off to a new world but were still tied to the other. Over time, the language of geographic origin began to change; the ancestral home no longer the distant Africa of unknown forebears but the more immediate South of uncles and grandparents, where the culture they carried inside them was pure and familiar.
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