Summary of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson

by Gold Christopher

This is a summary and not the main book. From 1915 to 1970, this mass migration of nearly 6,000,000 individuals changed the essence of America. Wilkerson draws parallels between this massive migration and other historical migrations. In order to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, transforming our cities, our nation, and ourselves, she conducted interviews with more than a thousand people and obtained access to new data and official records. With shocking verifiable detail, Wilkerson recounts to this story through the existences of three exceptional Ida Mae Gladney, who moved from Mississippi's sharecropping and prejudice to Chicago in 1937, where she quietly achieved blue-collar success and later voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat; George Starling, who was sharp and quick-tempered and fled Florida in 1945 for Harlem, where he lost his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a career in medicine and became Ray Charles' personal physician. His glittering successful medical career enabled him to buy a grand house where he frequently hosted extravagant parties.Their first perilous and exhausting journeys across the country by train and car, as well as their new lives in colonies that turned into ghettos, are beautifully captured by Wilkerson. He also shows how they changed these cities with southern food, faith, and culture and made them better with discipline, drive, and hard work. The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work that serves as both a major assessment and a riveting microcosm. It is also an excellent account of an "unrecognised immigration" within our own nation. This book is destined to become a classic due to the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of its writing, the breadth of its research, and the depth of the people and lives it depicts.

21 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 18, 2023