What is The Warmth of Other Suns about?

Isabel Wilkerson's account of the Great Migration — the movement of six million Black Americans from the South to the North and West between 1915 and 1970 — is one of the most important works of narrative nonfiction published in the twenty-first century. It tells the story of this vast demographic shift through three individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, a sharecropper's wife who left Mississippi for Chicago in 1937; George Swanson Starling, a citrus picker who left Florida for New York in 1945; and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, a doctor who left Louisiana for Los Angeles in 1953. It took Wilkerson fifteen years to report and write.

The three narratives are interwoven rather than told consecutively, and the interweaving builds a cumulative argument that what these three individuals experienced was simultaneously unique and representative. Each carried a specific set of skills, family circumstances, and ambitions; each faced a specific iteration of the racial terror and economic exploitation that drove the migration; and each arrived at a specific northern or western city at a specific moment of receiving community's history. The individual stories make the statistical abstraction of six million people comprehensible.

Wilkerson is meticulous about the conditions that produced the migration. The caste system of the Jim Crow South — the formal laws and the informal codes that governed every interaction between Black and white, the violence that maintained the system, the specific economic arrangements that kept Black sharecroppers in permanent debt — is rendered in physical and documentary detail. She interviewed over a thousand people during her research, and the testimony she collected gives the statistics of lynching, of wage theft, of poll taxes, of separate and inferior everything, the weight of lived experience.

The arrivals in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles are rendered with equal specificity. The Great Migration transformed the cities that received it — in music, in politics, in economics, in the structure of residential segregation that northern cities developed to contain the new arrivals. Wilkerson traces these transformations without sentimentalizing the North: the conditions in northern cities were better than the conditions in the Jim Crow South, and also significantly worse than the conditions of white northern residents, and the book holds both facts simultaneously.