Barbara Beckwith

Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns – The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration is a great narrative journalism saga, told through the stories of three African Americans — who were among the millions of Southern Blacks who went North (one in 30s, one in 40s, one in 50s) to escape white supremacist threats against them, or in the case of a surgeon, to be free to practice his medical specialty. Shows how they may have escaped virulent Jim Crow violence and exclusion, but how in the North they continued to be blocked by insidious Northern-style racism). It’s being said that it will get the Pulitzer Prize, tho Wilkerson has already won a Pulitzer Prize for her individual reporting. If you picture Jim Crow as being only about segregated schools, buses and water fountains, this book will show you the extensiveness of petty humiliations that stifled African Americans in body and soul. Wilkerson compares the movement of Black southerners to the North to European immigration.