Book Review:  The Warmth of Other Suns
Using history to support exploration of past and current race relation issues.
Karen White, Ph.D.  

Summer may finally be emerging in the Chicago area.   And summer in Chicago means incredibly good, free music festivals….such as the Gospel Music Festival in May, the Blues Festival in June, and the Jazz Festival in early September. Why do Chicago music festivals come to mind in a review of Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns?  Because without the mass migration of American Blacks from the US South to the North and West, Chicago might only be “appreciated” for its extreme winter weather and blow hard politics.  Chicago culture was forever enriched by the infusion of music originally developed in the American South by enslaved Africans and their “freed” descendants.  Wilkerson’s book is about far more than the African American influence on music in Chicago.  It offers a view of American history that is rarely recognized.  
     Wilkerson brings to life the Great Migration that took place between 1915 and 1970, a journey that followed along three train routes leaving the South to cities along the eastern seaboard, the industrialized upper Midwest, and Los Angeles and Oakland areas of California.  Many European Americans have a strong sense of the immigrant stories of their own families, but few appreciate the challenges placed on African Americans’ efforts to break free of the post-emancipation oppression of poverty, the indentured servitude of sharecropping, and the extreme inequities of the educational system in the South. Although African Americans may have escaped the overt discrimination of Jim Crow laws in the South, their efforts to make a better life in the North and West were often thwarted by subtle and outright prejudice in crowded cities where there was intense competition for resources among White and Black “immigrants”.   
     The beauty of Wilkerson’s craft is evident in her presentation of three individual stories of migration;  each person from a different decade of the Great Migration, each with a different destination (Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles).  The unfairness of sharecropping economics, the threat of the Klan, and the disrespect of one’s hard earned advanced education are all made palpable in the stories of Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Starling, and Robert Foster.   In describing the lives of these individuals in almost novel-like form, Wilkerson engenders an appreciation of the motivation to leave one’s home in the South and the tremendous courage required to take such risks. The stories are imbedded in a deeply contextualized presentation of the times and segments of black society in which each person lived.   Wilkerson conducted more than a thousand interviews and consulted hundreds of printed sources.  Wilkerson’s masterful storytelling brings one to a new appreciation of American history and why we might be looking at today’s wrenching stories of frustration and violence in urban settings.
Wilkerson covers seven decades of a continuous stream of migration, and it should not escape us that although we are many years past the “Civil Rights Era”, our society is struggling to face an ugly scene of African Americans being unjustly arrested, abused, and murdered at the hands of “authorities”.   These injustices placed in the political context of an African American president, and now the second African American attorney general, cause us all to wonder how to understand the enormous advancements and shockingly slow progress for a group of Americans who, as a group, have been in this land longer than most European Americans.  Our current graduate students have certainly grown up in more integrated schools and peer groups, but may lack an appreciation of how and why race relations in this country remain such a painful, threatening topic to broach in a group context.  Perhaps Isabel Wilkerson’s book is an opportunity for all of us to deepen our sense of history about American culture. It may be one way to draw graduate students (and faculty colleagues) into an exploration of diversity issues. Wilkerson’s book invites an appreciation of our recent history and the complexities of race relations. Her beautiful prose and deep understanding of history should hold our minds open and make us curious about the American experience in all of its shades and stages.  
     Understanding today’s issues may require us to step beyond our own time-locked point of view.  Consider exploring even brief segments of Wilkerson’s book for group discussions.   In addition, below are listed some other books. One is about female abolitionists from South Carolina. Two other books are from the perspectives of individuals who were born into slavery. The Library of Congress sponsored the Federal Writers’ Project which created work for jobless writers and social workers to interview African Americans who had lived under slavery. The interviewees were at least ten years old at the time they were freed and were interviewed during the Great Depression as they approached their 80s and 90s.  Reading historical work from the perspective of individuals who lived it sometimes pulls us in to a space more conducive to reflection on the human experience.