The Warmth Of Other Suns

Published in 2010, The Warmth of Other Suns is a sweeping ethnography of the Great Migration—the mass exodus of African-Americans from the South to Northern and Western US cities dating from approximately 1914-1970. The book traces the history of racism in the Jim Crow South as well as the reasons, successes, and failures of those African-Americans who left the place of their birth in order to seek better economic and social opportunities elsewhere in the United States.

Plot Summary

In The Warmth of Other Suns, author Isabel Wilkerson moves between the stories of three individuals—Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Pershing Foster—discussing the historical background, statistics, and ultimate social influences the Great Migration had on the South and on the Northern ports of refuge that received nearly six million African-American migrants. Today, these black migrants appear as a modern version of the Europeans who flooded America’s shores in the late 1800s and early 1900s, both groups determined to roll the dice for a better future. It is no surprise, therefore, to find census data showing that Black Americans who left the South had far more schooling than those who stayed, and that Black migrants had higher employment numbers and more stable family lives than Northern-born Black people, as shown by lower divorce rates and fewer children born outside of marriage.