Image from Amazom
When I saw that the New York Times named The Warmth of Other Suns-The Epic Story of America's Great Migration as the BEST NONFICTION OF ALL TIME and that it was on Time's BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE list, I went in search of a digital copy at my local library.
This 622 page book, published in 2010, was quite absorbing, but even so I was unable to finish reading it before my library loan expired and I bought a copy through Amazon so that I could read the last 100 pages. I think it is the first time that I have ever done that, but I couldn't wait for my turn at the library copy to come around again.
This Pulitzer Prize winning biography , a debut book written by Isabel Wilkerson, is a remarkable account of an unrecognized migration in the United States that took place from 1915 to 1970 as 6 million southern blacks, or likely more, left the south on perilous journeys to areas in the urban north and west, looking for a better life. The migrants left behind, family, friends, hometowns and memories and changed their new cities with their faith, culture and southern food. The pattern of the migration was determined by the train routes that were available to the people were brave enough to leave.
The historical detail of the book was throughly researched and tells the story of the migration through the lives of 3 different people, Ida Mae Gladney, who left sharecropping in Mississippi and settled in Chicago, George Starling who fled the citrus groves in Florida looking for a job in New Your city and became a railway porter, working on trains that carried him back into the south. Robert Foster, a physician who left Louisiana and drove to California, became a well known doctor and the personal physician and friend of Ray Charles.
They left behind the repression of the Jim Crow laws of the south to experience new forms of racism in the north. They made sacrifices and they gave hope to younger generations that they could also start better lives.
Natchez Museum of African American History and Culture. Natchez, Mississippi.
I had never considered the fact that other migrants to the US, coming from Germany, Russia, and Poland could much more easily blend into society, often changing their foreign sounding names, but for these black migrants it was much more difficult to be accepted.
The Warmth of Other Suns is beautifully written and is one of the best nonfiction books that I have ever read, and I learned unforgettable facts and was enlightened about the history of the United States.
Natchez Museum of African American History and Culture. Natchez, Missippi
The title of the book comes from black writer Richard Wright who fled Mississippi in the 1920s to feel the warmth of other Suns. He spent part of his life in Natchez and it was while visiting here that I became interested in reading his books.
The author, Isabel Wilkerson, is a daughter of the Great Migration and devoted fifteen years and interviewed 1.200 people to tell this story. Her new book, Caste:The Origins of Our Discontents has been getting great reviews. Oprah Winfrey chose Caste as her Summer 2020 pick and proclaimed it "the most essential... the most necessary-for-all-humanity book that I have chose". It will definitely go on my ToBeRead list!
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