This book is a meticulously researched saga of the Great Migration of African Americans in the Jim Crow South to the West and North. The narrative follows three brave individuals on their journeys. It is a amazing achievement about real heros, packed with raw history.
I'm at a loss as to how to write a review worthy of this masterpiece. Ms. Wilkerson's exemplary storytelling and years of interviews and research and her own history come together to tell this incredible story. She writes about the best and worst of humanity from punishing lynchings to unyielding courage and perseverence of the oppressed.
Here are a few of the many passages that stayed with me.
"A series of unpredictable events and frustrations led to the decisions of Ida Mae Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Pershing Foster to leave the South for good. Their decisions were separate and distinct from anything in the outside world except that they were joining a road already plied decades before by people as discontented as themselves. A thousand hurts and killed wishes led to a final determination by each fed-up individual on the verge of departure, which, added to millions of others, made up what could be called a migration."
"Any migration takes some measure of energy, planning, and forethought. It requires not only the desire for something better but the willingness to act on that desire to achieve it. Thus the people who undertake such a journey are more likely to be either among the better educated of their homes of origin or those most motivated to make it in the New World, researchers have found."
"Contrary to modern-day assumptions, for much of the history of the United States—from the Draft Riots of the 1860s to the violence over desegregation a century later—riots were often carried out by disaffected whites against groups perceived as threats to their survival. Thus riots would become to the North what lynchings were to the South, each a display of uncontained rage by put-upon people directed toward the scapegoats of their condition.
Nearly every big northern city experienced one or more during the twentieth century. Each outbreak pitted two groups that had more in common with each other than either of them realized. Both sides were made up of rural and small-town people who had traveled far in search of the American Dream, both relegated to the worst jobs by industrialists who pitted one group against the other. Each side was struggling to raise its families in a cold, fast, alien place far from their homelands and looked down upon by the earlier, more sophisticated arrivals. They were essentially the same people except for the color of their skin, and many of them arrived into these anonymous receiving stations at around the same time, one set against the other and unable to see the commonality of their mutual plight."
In the following, Robert Pershing Foster tries to get a hotel room to rest in New Mexico on his long drive to California:
"He replayed the rejections in his mind as he drove the few yards to the next motel. Maybe he hadn’t explained himself well enough. Maybe it wasn’t clear how far he had driven. Maybe he should let them know he saw through them, after all those years in the South. He always prepared a script when he spoke to a white person. Now he debated with himself as to what he should say.
He didn’t want to make a case of it. He never intended to march over Jim Crow or try to integrate anybody’s motel. He didn’t like being where he wasn’t wanted. And yet here he was, needing something he couldn’t have. He debated whether he should speak his mind, protect himself from rejection, say it before they could say it. He approached the next exchange as if it were a job interview. Years later he would practically refer to it as such. He rehearsed his delivery and tightened his lines. “It would have been opening-night jitters if it was theater,” he would later say.
He pulled into the lot. There was nobody out there but him, and he was the only one driving up to get a room. He walked inside. His voice was about to break as he made his case.
“I’m looking for a room,” he began. “Now, if it’s your policy not to rent to colored people, let me know now so I don’t keep getting insulted.”
A white woman in her fifties stood on the other side of the front desk. She had a kind face, and he found it reassuring. And so he continued.
“It’s a shame that they would do a person like this,” he said. “I’m no robber. I’ve got no weapons. I’m not a thief. I’m a medical doctor. I’m a captain that just left Austria, which was Salzburg. And the German Army was just outside of Vienna. If there had been a conflict, I would have been protecting you. I would not do people the way I’ve been treated here.”
It was the most he’d gotten to say all night, and so he went on with his delivery more determinedly than before. “I have money to pay for my services,” he said. “Now, if you don’t rent to colored people, let me know so I can go on to California. This is inhuman. I’m a menace to anybody driving. I’m a menace to myself and to the public, driving as tired as I am.”
She listened, and she let him make his case. She didn’t talk about mistaken vacancy signs or just-rented rooms. She didn’t cut him off. She listened, and that gave him hope.
“One minute, Doctor,” she said, turning and heading toward a back office.
His heart raced as he watched her walk to the back. He could see her consulting with a man through the glass window facing the front desk, deciding in that instant his fate and his worth. They discussed it for some time and came out together. The husband did the talking. He had a kind, sad face. Robert held his breath. “We’re from Illinois,” the husband said. “We don’t share the opinion of the people in this area. But if we take you in, the rest of the motel owners will ostracize us. We just can’t do it. I’m sorry.”
Wilkerson wrote this about Harlem and the Harlem Renaissance:
“The basic collapse of all organized efforts to exclude Negroes from Harlem was the inability of any group to gain total and unified support of all white property owners in the neighborhood,” Osofsky wrote. “Landlords forming associations by blocks had a difficult time keeping people on individual streets united.”
The free-spirited individualism of immigrants and newcomers seeking their fortune in the biggest city in the country thus worked to the benefit of colored people needing housing in Harlem. It opened up a place that surely would have remained closed in the straitjacketed culture of the South.
By the 1940s, when George Starling arrived, Harlem was a mature and well-established capital of black cultural life, having peaked with the Harlem Renaissance, plunged into Depression after the 1929 stock market crash, climbed back to life during World War II, and, unbeknownst to the thousands still arriving from Florida, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Virginia, not to mention Jamaica and the rest of the Caribbean when George got there, was at that precise moment as rollickingly magical as it was ever likely to be.
Seventh Avenue was the Champs-Élysées, a boulevard wide and ready for any excuse for a parade, whether the marches of the minister Father Divine or several thousand Elks in their capes and batons, and, on Sunday afternoons, the singular spectacle called The Stroll. It was where the people who had been laundresses, bellmen, and mill hands in the South dressed up as they saw themselves to be—the men in frock coats and monocles, the women in fox stoles and bonnets with ostrich feathers, the “servants of the rich Park and Fifth Avenue families” wearing “hand-me-downs from their employers,” all meant to evoke startled whispers from the crowd on the sidewalk: “My Gawd, did you see that hat?”
Virtually every black luminary was living within blocks of the others in the elevator buildings and lace-curtained brownstones up on Sugar Hill, from Langston Hughes to Thurgood Marshall to Paul Robeson, Duke Ellington, and W. E. B. Du Bois, on and off, to Richard Wright, who had now outgrown even Chicago, and his friend and protégé Ralph Ellison, who actually lived in Washington Heights but said it was close enough to be Harlem and pretty much considered it so."
If I were to approach reading this book again for the first time, I would slow down and savor it. I might expect to read it over a period of several months instead of over a week as I did. There is so much to take in. I rushed it.
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Popular Highlights in this book
Over the course of six decades, some six million black southerners left the land of their forefathers and fanned out across the country for an uncertain existence in nearly every other corner of America.Highlighted by 7,011 Kindle readers- “The measure of a man’s estimate of your strength,” he finally told them, “is the kind of weapons he feels that he must use in order to hold you fast in a prescribed place.”Highlighted by 6,350 Kindle readers
- The layers of accumulated assets built up by the better-paid dominant caste, generation after generation, would factor into a wealth disparity of white Americans having an average net worth ten times that of black Americans by the turn of the twenty-first century, dampening the economic prospects of the children and grandchildren of both Jim Crow and the Great Migration before they were even born.Highlighted by 6,272 Kindle readers
- In 1896, in the seminal case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court sided with the South and ruled, in an eight-to-one vote, that “equal but separate” accommodations were constitutional. That ruling would stand for the next sixty years.Highlighted by 5,440 Kindle readers
- And more than that, it was the first big step the nation’s servant class ever took without asking.Highlighted by 4,444 Kindle readers
From the Publisher
About the author
You're Cheating Yourself If You Don't Read This Book
If you have a difficult time finding a copy of this book, blame me. I have been telling everyone I know about it and one well-placed friend is buying hundreds of copies to share with friends in Africa who are perplexed by the predicament so many Black Americans find themselves in to this day. The Warmth of Other Suns paints the picture as compellingly and completely as anything I've ever seen or read. As the stories of desperation, ambition and flight unfold, the reader can see just how many ways the American Dream was yanked away, hidden or otherwise made inaccessible to one generation after another. George, for example, could have been so much more than a railroad porter. He wanted to be more. He TRIED to be more. He even went to college at a time when that was all but unheard of for a young black man from the citrus belt of Florida. Danger and deprivation robbed him of that opportunity and all of the possibilities that would have come with it. Instead, he ended up an overworked denizen of substandard housing, with broken knees and bad kidneys from all the years of picking oranges and tangerines then stacking and unloading luggage on railroad runs along the eastern seaboard. Meanwhile, his New York-born-and-raised children -- not privy to the "village" atmosphere of family and child-rearing of George's native Southland -- were left to fend for themselves in the impersonal, take-a-number concrete jungle of an overpopulated city and, with limited options, spent their energies on getting into, or ducking, trouble. The reader can just see the State of Black America take shape. This is an absolute masterpiece by a virtuoso writer. As I neared the end of it, I got the blues, knowing how much I would miss reading it. So, I did what any right-thinking person would do: I read it again. Please do yourself a huge favor and read this. It is, simply, amazing. -Deborah Mathis
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- gerardpeterReviewed in the United Kingdom on May 10, 2025
Elegy to a Forgotten Generation
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Xavier GilReviewed in Spain on November 30, 2017
Un llibre clau per comprendre el conflicte racial als EUA
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- Francois von ZedtwitzReviewed in Germany on May 17, 2024
Excellent book
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