Because Ideas Matter...
The faculty and staff of Butler University's College of Liberal
Arts and Sciences presents
Recommended Readings
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of
American's Great Migration
by Isabel Wilderson, Vintage, 2010
Reviewed by Mary Ramsbottom
If your reading habits tend to a few pages
a night compensated by weekend sprints, you might wonder whether
The Warmth of Other Suns, at 500+ pages, is worth the investment.
Indeed, it is. In Suns, Isabel Wilkerson reconstructs the
Great Migration of African-American families to urban centers of
the northern and western states between World War I and the
1970's. Drawing on more than a thousand oral histories, Suns'
narrative pull comes from three families whose choices, reflecting
economic and social causes common to migrations everywhere, were
lent special urgency by the brutalities of the Jim Crow
south. Wilkerson resists the temptation to ask Ida Mae
Gladney (Mississippi to South Side Chicago), George Starling
(Florida to Harlem), and Robert Foster (Louisiana to Los Angeles)
to carry too heavy a representative burden for a movement
encompassing millions. These lives are richly resonant, but
they also display varieties in individual experience inflected by
gender, geography, educational background, personality, and
opportunity. Wilkerson interweaves original research and recent
scholarly interpretations into the narrative; for example, she
provides a welcome corrective to the dominant
late-twentieth-century lament that southern migrants imported
cultural and family dysfunction to northern
communities. While allowing her narrators
pride of place throughout, Wilkerson thus satisfies the general
non-fiction reader's desire for contextualization and assessment of
historical consequence.
- Mary Ramsbottom is Associate Provost for Student Academic
Affairs at Butler University.