I recently finished teaching Isabel Wilkerson鈥檚聽The Warmth of Other Suns聽as part of my Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Global Migration Honors course. Though it is a historical work about the Great Migration out of the South and to the North by Black Americans from about 1915-1970, the book reads more like a novel. Wilkerson focuses on three main characters, with whom she spent hundreds of hours during the last years of their lives, but weaves in research from newspaper archives, 1200 other interviews, her own family鈥檚 history, academic texts, and more to paint a full, terrible, beautiful picture of the Great Migration and its effects on every single part of American life. As someone who grew up White in New England, these were not stories I had heard before. The Great Migration was a footnote, easily skipped over, and in talking with students today I find not much has changed in the teaching of this history. Black students are intimately familiar with it; most White students are not.聽
At over 500 pages of text, this book is a commitment, and in the past I have had students read excerpts or focus on the story of just one of the three main people. While they appreciated the lighter workload, however, students felt that only reading parts of the book was a disservice to Wilkerson鈥檚 work and to the stories it contained. Having been exposed to the terrible truths of life in the South 鈥� and for many, the surprisingly terrible truths of life in the North 鈥� they wanted to do the stories justice. So we spend many weeks reading the book, talking about what it means that they did not learn these stories in school, what it means to think about citizens who never crossed a national border as immigrants, and how this connects to other works we read about refugees, forced migration, and the challenges of finding your place in a world that seems determined to reject you.
This book is powerful, and if you too did not grow up with these stories as part of your family lore, it will change you. It should also change how you think about the 鈥渋nner city,鈥� the 鈥渂enevolence鈥� of the North in accepting all these refugees, the legacy of racial segregation today 鈥� and even the music of Ray Charles. It is heartbreaking, but it is beautiful, and if you live anywhere in the United States or care about people who do, it is a book you should read.