The Warmth of Other Suns stood out among the books I read this year as a masterpiece. Wilkerson does what all good historians aim to do and seamlessly weaved a cogent history of the Great Migration into the lives of three individuals who lived it. They were Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, who journeyed from Mississippi to Chicago, George Swanson Starling, who went from Eustis, Florida, to New York City, and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, who migrated from Monroe, Louisiana, to Los Angeles. The story extends through their whole lives in "the old country" all the way through their travels to the new worlds of the north or west and their eventual deaths at old ages in the 1990s and 2000s.
Many black southerners were still picking cotton in a sharecropping system well into the middle of the 20th century, and we are introduced to Ida Mae doing so in the 1920s. At that time, the gold standard for picking cotton was to pick a hundred pounds a day, which would net you fifty cents. Ida Mae could never do it. "It was like picking a hundred pounds of feathers, a hundred pounds of lint dust." And it required being stooped over all day, picking seven thousand bolls to reach a hundred pounds, picking past the branches seven thousand times a day with cramped hands and an aching back. After ten or twelve hours, the pickers could barely stand up straight after stooping all day. Worst of all, sharecroppers often made no money or found themselves owing at the end of the year. When the harvest was done and it was time to settle up with the plantation boss, he would deduct the expenses that he was "owed" by the sharecroppers, and would somehow always end up paying them a pittance if at all. More often, it would turn out that they were even, or that somehow the sharecroppers owed money. In the 1930s, 80% broke even or stayed in debt at the end of the year. This entrapped people in a cycle of de facto slavery.
But sharecropping picking cotton, while significant, was not the only major job for blacks in the South at the time. George Starling picked oranges in Florida. But after he went to Detroit during World War Two, he got used to fair wages for hard work, not having to step off the sidewalk when a white person walked by, and not needing be subservient to whites at all times. He ended up getting in trouble in Florida for leading orange-pickers to demand higher wages for their work, effectively unionizing them. Southerners returning from the North would end up having a huge impact on the Civil Rights Movement. After spending a summer or a few weeks or however long in the North, these returned laborers were often the strongest advocates for the end of Jim Crow.
The Great Migration began in World War One when the North opened up after the war "cut the supply of European workers that the North had relied on to kill its hogs and stoke its foundries. Immigration plunged by more than ninety percent, from 1,218,480 in 1914 to 110,618 in 1918, when the country needed all the labor it could get for war production." Then, Southern blacks were the best possible workers because they spoke the language, were used to hard work, and were also unschooled in labor organizing. Initially, steel mills, railroads, and packinghouses sent labor scouts to recruit blacks to come North. Southern states and towns banned these recruiters, but after the initial wave, they were unnecessary since the word had already spread about better wages up North. In the 1910s, about "550,000 colored people left the South," more than in the entire half century following the Emancipation Proclamation.
And why is the book called The Warmth of Other Suns? Wilkerson writes that, "In the winter of 1919, when Ida Mae was still trailing her father out to the field, George and Pershing were learning to crawl, and the first wave of migrants was stirring to life, ... Edwin Hubble, working out of the University of Chicago, looked through one of the most powerful telescopes of his time.... Hubble identified a star that was far, far away and was not the same sun that fed life on Earth. It was another sun. And it would prove for the first time in human history that there were galaxies other than our own, that the universe was much bigger than humans had ever imagined, that there were, in fact, other suns." The migrants from the South were those original explorers who found out that there were better ways to live in America than under Jim Crow, and who returned to the South to spread the good news that there was a way to live in America with dignity while being black. In doing so, they opened up new galaxies for African Americans. One of the most impactful perspective-changing things in the book is how Wilkerson directly compares African Americans to Sicilian, Swedish, and other European immigrants essential seeking out the same American dream. The book encapsulates the essence of what it means to strive for something better and tells the story of millions perfectly through three individuals. It is a must-read.
Miscellaneous:
- In 1919, a colored soldier named Wilbur Little returned home from WWI to Blakely, Georgia. A group of white men demanded that he take off his uniform at the train station and walk home in his underwear. He refused, and then a mob attacked him a few days later and beat him to death on the outskirts of town, still wearing his uniform.
- Dr. Robert Foster, one of the three migrants whose story is told in the book, was Ray Charles' doctor, and the song "Hide Nor Hair" is partially about him.
- Prince Edward County, VA, closed its entire school system from 1959 to 1964 rather than integrate.
- Studies conducted in the 1930s found that after four years in the North, the children of black migrants to New York scored nearly as well as northern-born blacks who were at the same level as white children. This study helped form the basis of the Brown v. Board ruling, meaning that those migrants would have a decades-long impact back where they had come from.
