The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson.

4/5 rating. 560 pages.

Book #5 of 2023. Read February 26, 2023.

This book tells the story of The Great Migration of African Americans to escape the American South during Jim Crow.

The amount of research and information in here is astounding and Isabel does an incredible job making the whole book really interesting. I learned so much reading this book!

It follows the lives of 3 separate African-Americans in 3 different southern states, and their respective moves to LA, NYC, and Chicago to get away from the explicit hate they received down in the South in the early twentieth century.

It talks about the fuller picture of the Migration through experiences felt by these main characters. They all left for different reasons, but overall, they were seeking better lives, and lured by the idea that their only hope of building an actual future meant leaving their homes and escaping the South.

Some quotes I liked:

“The Great Migration would not end until the 1970s, when the South began finally to change – the whites-only signs came down, the all-white schools opened up, and everyone could vote. By then nearly half of all black Americans – some forty-seven percent – would be living outside the South, compared to ten percent when the Migration began.”

“Most of them care nothing whatsoever about race. They want only their proper place in the sun and the right to be left alone, like any other citizen of the republic.” – James Baldwin

Additional Quotes:

“She has big searching eyes that see the good in people despite the evil she has seen,”

“Across the South, someone was hanged or burned alive every four days from 1889 to 1929,”

“Streetcars, widely in use from the 1880s, had open seating in the South, until Georgia demanded separate seating by race in 1891.”

“Florida [seceded] on January 10, 1861, three weeks after the first rebel state of South Carolina, and a day after Mississippi. Florida heartily joined a new country whose cornerstone, according to the Confederacy’s vice president, Alexander Hamilton Stephens, was ‘the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery – subordination to the superior race – is his natural and normal condition.’ This new government, Stephens declared, ‘is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.’”

“There were things she was good at and things she was not so good at, and saved herself a lot of aggravation by knowing the difference between the two.”

“‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘you have to stoop to conquer.’”

“He learned that all the book knowledge and equipment in the world didn’t make you a good doctor if you didn’t know what you were doing or listen to your patients.”

“Fewer than one out of five sharecroppers ever saw a profit at the end of the year. Of the few who got anything, their pay came to between $30 and $150 in the 1930s for a year of hard toil in the field…”

“A name was a serious undertaking. It was the first and maybe only thing colored parents could give a child, and they were often sentimental about it.”

“I was hoping I would be able to live as a man and express myself in a manly way without the fear of getting lynched at night.”

“If you really love a person, you won’t get him involved in something which might hurt him.”

“There were fifty-eight bombings of houses that blacks moved into or were about to move into between 1917 and 1921 alone, bombings having become one of the preferred methods of intimidation in the North.”

“Maybe you had to live through the worst of times to recognize the best of times when they came to you.”

“She put the disappointments in the back of her mind and lived in the moment, which is all anybody has for sure.”

#thewarmthofothersuns #isabelwilkerson #thegreatmigration #africanamerican #america #opportunity #abetterlife #books #bookrecommendations #bookreviews

IG Link.