By Kent Harbison
I highly recommend the book The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. It is a very well-written and compelling historical account of the Great Migration of blacks from the South to the North and West during America’s Jim Crow era from WW I to the early 1970s. Ms.Wilkerson took 15 years of comprehensive interviews and research to compile and write this story, largely through the lives of three families from Florida, Mississippi and Louisiana.
It is somewhat of a painful and embarrassing reminder of the laws, customs and living conditions affecting African Americans during this period. Indeed, some of these customs and conditions may be new revelations to some readers. This history also shows that the treatment of these “immigrants” was only mildly more favorable in the cities to which they migrated. Among the perspectives to be gleaned from this story is a reflection of the attitudes and actions by government officials and average citizens toward immigrants from foreign countries in recent years. Incidentally, Ms. Wilkerson’s writing credentials have been acknowledged by her being given a Pulitizer Prize for her reporting on the major flooding of the Upper Midwest in the 1990s when she was bureau chief in the Chicago office of the NY Times.
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