New book on Great Migration offers intimate portraits

One of the most important societal shifts in 20th century America remains one of the least understood: the migration of hundreds of thousands – eventually millions -- of black rural southerners to the nation’s large cities. This leaderless movement, labeled by historians as the Great Migration, spanned from the 1910s to the 1970s and has touched the lives of every American in some way or another.

Just as waves of European immigrants forever changed our country, so did the African-American migration -- from the music we hear to where we live to whom we vote for and why. Great books have been written about this broad phenomenon. Nicholas Lemann's The Promised Land (1992) comes to mind. Lemann did a spectacular job of capturing the impact of the migration and how its influence continues to reverberate.

But what did the Great Migration actually feel like for the millions who picked up and moved?

The Warmth of Other Suns answers that question.

Isabel Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize winner who taught journalism at Emory University, explores the epic event not with the aerial view of grand history, but with intimate focus on a few of the ordinary people who did something extraordinary: they made the difficult but liberating trek away from the South.

The book (its title taken from a line by Richard Wright) is an important contribution to our understanding of the Great Migration, not because it breaks new ground on the social forces involved or explores new aspects of the racism that prodded so many to leave. The book’s power arises from its close attention to intimate details in the lives of regular people.

Wilkerson’s tome is an intertwined triptych of three lives – Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, a doctor who moves to Los Angeles from Louisiana by way of Atlanta; Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a woman who moves to Chicago from Mississippi; and George Swanson Starling, a railroad porter who moves to New York from Florida.

Through years of research and hours of interviews with these three (all of whom have since passed away), Wilkerson shows us what the Great Migration was like for those who lived through it. This close-to-the-ground approach is the book’s great strength.

Wilkerson masterfully recreates her subjects’ trials and indignities in the Jim Crow South. Gladney, as a little girl, actually had to hide in a barrel of grits to escape a drunken white man with a gun. Life was dangerous, grueling and unfair. Yet Wilkerson’s portraits are full of that actual nuance of real life. The migrants meet horrible whites, but also kind ones. They meet helpful blacks, and also untrustworthy ones. They escape the oppression of the South, yet Wilkerson is careful to show that life in America’s cities had its own racial strictures and ugliness. As one man tells Robert Foster when he moves to California, prejudice there was only slightly better. Instead of Jim Crow, they sardonically called it James Crow.

As Wilkerson writes about migrating to New York: “There were no colored or white signs in New York. That was the unnerving and tricky part of making your way through a place that looked free.”

Wilkerson also shows how hard the transition was for poor country folks to adjust to urban life. At one point, a Southern relative visiting Gladney in Chicago complains loudly that he cannot blow out a light in his bedroom to go to sleep. Gladney’s husband comes to the room to find the relative blowing on an electric light bulb.

If you want to learn the broad facts and ramifications of the Great Migration, read Lemann. But if you want to learn about what being a migrant felt like, read Wilkerson. Her intimate portraits convey – as no book prior ever has – what the migration meant to those who were a part of it.

The book has some flaws. Wilkinson’s writing can be beautiful, but at times it’s overwrought. Another problem is structural. As Wilkerson traces the three lives, chapters jump back and forth in time to keep the lives on parallel tracks. It can be confusing. These, however, are quibbles.

In total, The Warmth of Other Suns stands as a vital contribution to our understanding of the black American experience and of the unstoppable social movement that shaped modern America.

Cameron McWhirter is a staff writer at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He is author of Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America, set to be published by Henry Holt next year.

BOOK DISCUSSION

Isabel Wilkerson will discuss her book, The Warmth of Other Suns, at the Atlanta History Center on Sept. 10 at 8 p.m. Admission is $5 members; $10 for nonmembers. Reservations are required for all lectures. Call 404.814.4150. For more information, visit www.atlantahistorycenter.com .