The Warmth of Other Suns

English language

Published Sept. 7, 2010

ISBN:
978-0-679-44432-9
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5 stars (1 review)

In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. She interviewed more than a thousand individuals, and gained access to new data and offical records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves. - Back cover.

7 editions

One of the biggest shifts in American society in history

5 stars

This is a big scholarly work written in such a way that the reader can forget how much information is being transmitted. It was quite different from this author's other book, Caste_ The Origins of Our Discontents, which took a more impersonal approach to many of the same issues, more scholarly and less emotional in effect. The migration of millions of American Blacks over the middle decades of the twentieth century transformed both the Jim Crow states and the ones they moved to. It wasn't organized by any one person but came from the life choices of thousands of free Blacks facing lives often only a little better than under slavery when they heard about the opportunities available to them if only they could abandon the place of their birth. They took much of what they knew from the South to inform their new lives and those of their children. …