About this book
The Warmth of Other Suns is a history of the Great Migration, the movement of millions of Black Americans out of the Jim Crow South between roughly 1915 and 1970. They headed to cities such as Chicago, New York, Detroit and Los Angeles, changing those places and the country as a whole.
Isabel Wilkerson, a journalist, tells this vast story through three people who made the journey in different decades: Ida Mae Gladney, who left Mississippi for Chicago; George Starling, who left Florida for New York; and Robert Foster, a doctor who left Louisiana for California. She draws on extensive interviews to follow their lives in detail, and sets them against the broader history of segregation, racial violence and discrimination in both South and North.
The result is deeply human history, moving and often painful, that explains a migration many readers know little about. For the earlier history of slavery and freedom, read Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; for more American history, browse our Americas shelf.
Who it’s for
For readers who love history told through individual lives; long but absorbing and very accessible.
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