In the face of such intimidation, the urge to escape only intensified. “No other,” claimed the South Carolinian newspaper Columbia State, “would work long under the same conditions.” Laws were passed to prevent Northern recruiters from soliciting blacks, and those trying to emigrate were labeled fugitives subject to arrest. The vast numbers who joined the migration were a cause for alarm, as black labor was a crucial element of the Southern economy. “In one North Carolina courthouse,” she explains, “there was a white Bible and a black Bible to swear to tell the truth on.”ĭespite the great lengths Southern whites went to in order to separate themselves from African Americans, they paradoxically took extreme measures to prevent the objects of their scorn from fleeing north.

Wilkerson details the racial protocol of the Jim Crow South with a coolness that demonstrates the banality of their evil and emphasizes their absurdity. Lynchings and executions were carried out to punish blacks for slights, real or imagined, toward whites-entire black communities could be wiped off the map by mob violence that was not only overlooked, but often abetted by law enforcement. Many southern blacks toiled in virtual slavery as sharecroppers, indebted to white landowners who shamelessly cooked the books to keep their workers in bondage, with the threat of violence hanging over those who’d challenge their integrity. The enormity of the oppression meted out to African Americans under Jim Crow cannot be overstated.

Their stories help us to better understand a world that seems far in the past, and reminds us that the past really wasn’t that long ago. We follow their stories from cradle to grave, share in their travels and travails, and thanks to Wilkerson’s brilliant storytelling, become deeply attached to them. Wilkerson’s protagonists include Ida Mae Gladney, a sharecropper who left Mississippi in the late-’30s for Chicago, George Starling, who escaped persecution in ’40s Florida and ended up in Harlem, and Robert Foster, an ambitious Louisianan who headed for the promised land of ’50s California.

It’s a powerful and heartrending story built on thousands of personal interviews and impressive research, carried by three intertwined migrant narratives that provide a rich, personal connection to this epic story. In The Warmth of Other Suns, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson sheds light on the mass migration of African Americans who fled the South in the first half of the 20th century in search of a better life.

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