The Warmth of Other Suns

"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. The Great Migration would become a turning point in American history. It would transform urban America and recast the social and political order of every city it touched. It would force the South to search its soul and finally to lay aside a feudal caste system. It grew out of the unmet promises made after the Civil War and, through the sheer weight of it, helped push the country toward the civil rights movement of the 1960s."

So writes Isabel Wilkerson in her stunning book The Warmth of Other Suns, which tells the story of those African Americans who, between 1915 and 1970, fled the old Confederacy and Jim Crow for freedom in the North and West. Though life would be different for them, it wasn't necessarily a paradise, but it did offer new opportunities and completely changed the face of big cities in the north, particularly Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Newark. Chicago went from 1.8 percent black at the turn of the century to one-third black by 1970; Detroit 1.4 percent to 44 percent. By the end of the 20th century, Detroit would be 80 percent black.

Wilkerson, ingeniously, chose to tell the story of The Great Migration primarily in narrative form, through the life stories of three of its participants, each of whom followed one of the usual paths out of the South, new forms of the Underground Railroad. Ida Mae Gladney, who picked cotton in rural Mississippi, escaped with her family to Chicago in 1937. George Starling, who tried to organize citrus pickers in central Florida, and thus marked himself for death, went to Harlem in 1945. Robert Pershing Foster, a physician from Monroe, Louisiana, who couldn't even see patients in the hospital in Monroe, set out for Los Angeles in the 1953. Each would find a certain measure of freedom--there were no "Whites Only" signs, and Ida Mae couldn't believe that she was allowed to vote once she got to  Chicago--just suggesting that in Mississippi would have gotten her killed.

But they would run into other kinds of troubles. It was interesting to read that blacks could not easily leave the South--they were still valued as labor, mostly as sharecroppers. Often they had to get on trains in stations far away from their home towns, to avoid being seen. Laughably, the white Southerners didn't understand why they wanted to leave. Apparently the rash of lynchings and an almost complete lack of rights didn't occur to them. Wilkerson tells of how bad it was--a black person couldn't even pass a white motorist on the roads. Policeman would stop blacks on a Saturday and ask them why they weren't working. And, of course, there was no justice for blacks. White sheriffs, like the one in Florida who terrorized George Starling, Willis McCall, were the law unto themselves.

So when they made their escape, it was like receiving the warmth from another sun, a title that Wilkerson borrows from Richard Wright, one of those who made the migration. Wilkerson writes about how the black culture thrived because of it; many famous blacks received opportunities they might not have received had they stayed, from sports stars like Jesse Owens and Bill Russell to musicians such as Miles Davis, Ray Charles and John Coltrane. All of the first mayors of big northern cities--Carl Stokes, Harold Washington, Coleman Young, David Dinkins, Wilson Goode, Tom Bradley, were part of the Great Migration.

But life wasn't a picnic in the North. Wilkerson is able to express the strange dichotomy of the southern attitude toward blacks to that in the North. White southerners had a long history of associating with blacks. There was segregation to be sure, but a co-existence. In the North, this was not so. The Great Migration started in World War I, when a shortage of labor prompted blacks to flee to get jobs out of the cotton fields, working on assembly lines and in factories. But soon the European immigrants began to feel threatened, and hatred, though not codified, was rampant. Wilkerson tells the story of how a black family tried to move into the all-white enclave of Cicero, Illinois, and it prompted a riot. My own hometown of Dearborn, Michigan, was fiercely segregated. For decades it was ruled with an iron fist by mayor Orville Hubbard, who said, "Negroes can't get in here. Every time we hear of a Negro moving in, we respond quicker than you do to a fire." Even today, Dearborn is only 1 percent black. Wilkerson doesn't mention it, but Dearborn would end up as a haven for Arab-Americans, something Hubbard couldn't have foreseen.

As The Warmth of Other Suns moves on, the stories of Wilkerson's three protagonists take over. Ida Mae, living in an all-black neighborhood on the South Shore, watches from her picture window as the neighborhood is taken over by drug dealers, gang-bangers, and prostitutes. George Starling works for years as a porter on Amtrak, never having any hope of being promoted. Before the Civil Rights Act is passed, he has the odd job of, when the train reaches the Mason-Dixon line, escorting black passengers into segregated cars. Robert Foster becomes a successful physician in Los Angeles (Ray Charles is one of his patients) and is part of high society. He turns his back on his roots, and his children know nothing of the degradation he suffered. One of the finest passages in the book is when Wilkerson relates his harrowing drive from Louisiana to California, driving all night through Texas, and then trying to find a hotel room in Arizona, where there is no Jim Crow law but motel owners still won't rent to colored customers.

Though this is a work of nonfiction, Wilkerson has the gifts of a poet. "Unknowingly, the migrants were walking into a headwind of resentment and suspicion. They could not hide the rough-cast clothes ill suited for northern winters or the slow syrup accents some northerners could not decipher. They carried with them the scents of the South, of lye soap and earthen field. They had emerged from a cave of restrictions into wide open, anonymous hives that viewed them with bemusement and contempt. They had been trained to walk humbly, look down when spoken to. It would take time to learn the ways of the North."