Question 1

What is the Great Migration and why did it happen?

Accepted Answer

The Great Migration refers to the movement of approximately six million Black Americans from the Jim Crow South to the North, Midwest, and West between roughly 1910 and 1970. The migration happened in two waves: the first wave (1910–1940) was driven primarily by the mechanization of cotton farming (which displaced agricultural laborers), the labor demands of northern industrial cities during World War I, and the violence and legal oppression of the Jim Crow South. The second wave (1940–1970) was driven by the labor demands of World War II industries in northern and western cities, continued mechanization in southern agriculture, and the persistence of racial terror in the South. The migrants came from every southern state but concentrated in particular urban destinations: Mississippi migrants went to Chicago, the Carolinas to New York, Texas to Los Angeles and Houston. The transformation of cities like Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Los Angeles was profound: these cities became majority-Black in many neighborhoods within a generation, and the culture those migrants brought with them — blues, jazz, gospel, eventually soul and hip-hop — became American popular culture.

Question 2

Who are the three people whose stories Wilkerson follows?

Accepted Answer

Ida Mae Gladney was a sharecropper's wife from Mississippi who left for Chicago with her husband and children in 1937 after her brother-in-law was lynched for allegedly stealing a neighbor's turkeys. George Swanson Starling was a young man from central Florida who organized a farmworker strike and was warned by friends that he would be killed if he didn't leave; he went to New York, where he worked as a railroad porter for thirty years. Robert Pershing Foster was a doctor from Monroe, Louisiana, trained at a Black medical school and forced to practice in segregated facilities; he drove across the country to Los Angeles, where he eventually became one of the most successful physicians in the city and Ray Charles's personal doctor. Wilkerson followed each of them for fifteen years before the book's publication, interviewing them about their lives, visiting the places they came from and the places they arrived, and weaving their stories together with the statistical and historical account of the Great Migration.

Question 3

How does The Warmth of Other Suns relate to contemporary racial politics?

Accepted Answer

The Warmth of Other Suns provides the essential historical background for understanding contemporary American racial inequality: the redlining of Black neighborhoods in northern cities (which prevented migrants from buying homes in appreciating white neighborhoods and locked their wealth into depreciating Black neighborhoods), the racially discriminatory application of the GI Bill (which prevented Black veterans from accessing the subsidized mortgages, college education, and business loans that built the white middle class after World War II), and the urban deindustrialization of the 1970s and 1980s (which stripped the industrial cities that the migrants had built their lives around of the manufacturing jobs that had made the migration worthwhile). The book is the essential historical companion to The New Jim Crow: Alexander's argument about mass incarceration as racialized social control is incomprehensible without the history of the Great Migration and its aftermath that Wilkerson provides.

The Warmth of Other Suns Reading Order

Complete The Warmth of Other Suns Book List