The warmth of other suns, by Isabel Wilkerson

Do you know what the term “The Great Migration” means in American history? I didn’t, but then when I was in school, there was little attention given to African American history, immigrant history in general, or to the history of that other “minority,” women. Isabel Wilkerson’s masterful work of “narrative non-fiction,” which she teaches at Boston University, is an eye-opening work which will engage and enlighten you. Between the end of World War I and the beginning of the 1970’s, six million African-Americans made their way from the American South to the North, Midwest, and West, one of the largest relocations of people anywhere or at anytime. Wilkerson focuses on the stories of Ida Mae Gladney, whose sharecropping family left Mississippi for Chicago in 1937; George Starling, who literally had to flee for his life to Harlem from the citrus groves of Florida in 1945; and Robert Foster, whose more privileged life as the physician son of teachers in Louisiana still wasn’t enough to keep him in the Jim Crow South. He ends up in Los Angeles in the early 1950’s, married to the daughter of the president of Atlanta University and doctor to Ray Charles. By choosing different eras when each emigrated; different personalities, educational attainments, life views, and reactions to racism; and different regions of the country, the author is able to make the many reasons that these six million left understandable. What could have been a dry work full of statistics is often as enthralling as a novel. A disturbing book to read, and an important one. Drop that copy of The Help (which I still contend is overrated and exploitative) and read this. (I should have sent this in for the September Staff Picks!) 543 pp.