The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

“The Warmth of Other Suns,” Wilkerson’s lush, expansive and harrowing history of the decades-long exodus of blacks, which became known as the Great Migration, is a formal distillation of that protracted chapter when black people in the South disappeared, often under the cover of night, frequently leaving their sharecropper’s tools in the fields, their future plans and whereabouts a mystery to those they left behind. All told, from 1915 to 1970, nearly 6 million African Americans made this trek, changing the face of the entire country. But it didn’t stop him or the others who made up the multiple waves of migration by African Americans out of the South, led by nothing else but sheer will. This was the new start the family’s patriarch, Harvey Clark, had abandoned Mississippi for only to find that the South - its reach and its beliefs - had tailed him.Ĭlark wouldn’t be the first, or the last, to stumble on this truth. In Illinois, the “Promised Land” of the North. They smashed the piano Clark had worked overtime to buy for his daughter and when they were done, they set the whole pile of the family’s belongings, now strewn on the ground below, on fire.”Īnother antique report from deep in the American South? Not quite: This was 1951. The neighbors burned the couple’s marriage license and the children’s baby pictures. A mob stormed the apartment and threw the family’s furniture out of a third-floor window as the crowds cheered below. The couple managed to get their furniture in, but as the day wore on, the crowds grew larger. housewives and grandmothers in swing coats and Mamie Eisenhower hats showed up to heckle them. On moving day, protesters would not let the family unload the police stopped the Clarks at the door.

Problem was, the neighborhood was all white. They found the perfect apartment: five rooms, modern and adjacent to city amenities.

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson