Book of the week: The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

(Random House, 622 pages, $30)

Isabel Wilkerson just might be right that the Great Migration of African-Americans from South to North was “the biggest underreported story of the 20th century,” said Jill Lepore in The New Yorker. Though most Americans today are aware that 6 million blacks left the South between 1915 and 1970, few books have described what that collective experience was like. Beginning almost 20 years ago, Wilkerson transformed herself into “something of a one-woman WPA project” to preserve that history. The author, who has won a Pulitzer Prize for her newspaper writing, interviewed 1,200 people who made the journey. Eventually, though, she focused on just three whose individual stories encapsulate a larger drama. Her “deeply affecting” new book offers fresh arguments about the causes and makeup of the exodus, but at heart it isn’t argument at all. It’s storytelling that says, “Hush, and listen.”

Wilkerson shows us a sharecropper’s wife who fled Mississippi after witnessing one too many black men get beaten by local white authorities, said Janet Maslin in The New York Times. She shows us a Florida citrus picker who escaped to New York when he heard he’d been targeted for lynching. “Finally, and unforgettably,” she shows us Dr. Robert Foster, a surgeon from Louisiana who turns out to be a mesmerizing raconteur. Foster recalls that, when he headed west for Los Angeles, he drove until he was exhausted—simply because he didn’t know where he would be able to safely stop for the night. In rendering moments like that, Wilkerson “does a superb job of capturing the way whole lives can be changed by small outrages.”

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Wilkerson’s book also overturns generations of received wisdom, said John Stauffer in The Wall Street Journal. Other scholars have argued that economic distress triggered the Great Migration, and that the black families who moved North “brought poverty” and family dysfunction with them. Wilkerson contends that the migrants were mostly fleeing Jim Crow segregation, and were better educated and led more stable lives than the blacks who already lived in the North. In fact, her African-American migrants sound a lot like the immigrant groups America regularly glorifies. Wilkerson’s “brilliant and stirring epic” has forever remapped our understanding of America’s 20th century.