Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author Joins Facing History Audiences in Conversation on Great Migration

“From the early years of the 20th century to well past its middle age, nearly every black family in the American south, which meant nearly every black family in America, had a decision to make.” – Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns

Isabel Wilkerson knew she had the idea for a book on her hands.

As a national correspondent for the New York Times and then later as its Chicago bureau chief, Isabel Wilkerson regularly traveled to urban African-American communities across the United States, covering a range of topics - race, politics, social injustice, gender, gun violence. As she reported, Wilkerson began to notice certain trends. The people she interviewed in Chicago often traced their roots to Mississippi. Those in Los Angeles tended to come from Louisiana. In New York City, residents had history in Florida. It was a geographic breakdown – one could practically draw lines from each northern or western city to a specific region in the South. “There were patterns that were apparent,” said Wilkerson, who in 1995 became the first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for reporting and is now a professor in the College of Communications at Boston University. “It seemed to me that this was part of some really big series of decisions that people took.”

What Wilkerson witnessed was living history – modern-day black Americans clustered together in the North as a direct result of last century’s Great Migration. It is a subject she explores in her bestselling first book, The Warmth of Other Suns, which she will discuss in Memphis, Tennessee, on March 1 as part of the Facing History and Ourselves' Community Conversation series, held in partnership with the Allstate Foundation. Ms. Wilkerson spoke with Facing History audiences in San Francisco and Denver earlier this winter.

As Wilkerson began working on The Warmth of Other Suns, she quickly discovered that existing research on the Great Migration was both scant and academic in its approach. “Economists and sociologists measured the arrival of the southerners to the North,” she said in a recent phone interview from her home in Atlanta. “They looked at the impact and the poverty rates, the employment rates. They didn’t look at the people or the grand narrative of the journey itself. They did not look at the protagonists that were facing challenges, reacting in the face of challenges, and then deciding to act on those challenges.”

These were the stories Wilkerson wanted to tell.

She set out to interview as many living participants in the Great Migration as possible. “It was a race against time,” she said. She visited senior centers, AARP meetings, high school reunions, and church group get-togethers across the country to find subjects. From the 1,200 people she interviewed over the course of 15 years, Wilkerson chose to focus on three: Ida Mae Brandon Gladney (who moved from Mississippi to Chicago when she was in the 1930s), Robert Joseph Pershing Foster (who traveled from Louisiana to California in the '50s), and George Swanson Starling (who made the trip from Florida to New York City in the '40s). “They left for three different reasons, had three different occupations, were all in different economic classes. They arrived to three different cities and had three different outcomes,” Wilkerson said. “You start to get this picture of what it meant to be a southerner in the North or West.”

As she studied what life was like for uprooted southerners in this time period, Wilkerson came to view these American migrants almost as immigrants in a new world. “Just like immigrants from other parts of the world, [the migrants] clustered together to protect themselves with the familiar,” she said. They retained recipes and traditions from their old lives and met together in clubs, churches, and groups where they could maintain old identities. They shared struggles of navigating new social norms and places. Like immigrants, the migrants grappled with issues of identity and membership. But there was a key distinction. Unlike immigrants, the migrants were already Americans. “This was the only point in time when Americans in the United States had to actually pick up and leave their home region for another, faraway place within the borders of their own country – just to be recognized,” Wilkerson said.

These issues of identity, migration, and citizenship have made The Warmth of Other Suns a useful tool for Facing History staff. “The story, and particularly the way Wilkerson tells the story, is so powerful in the Facing History context because it connects to the larger way in which we do history, which is history as a compilation of a lot of individual stories. It’s history seen as individual choices and individual lives,” said Laura Tavares, senior program associate in the organization’s New England office. Laura has used excerpts from the book (alongside the works of poet Langston Hughes and painter Jacob Lawrence) when covering the migration during the workshops on immigration she leads for Facing History teachers. “These stories help shape our understanding of American identity,” Laura said. “It allows us to see membership in a group as something that is dynamic, and it allows us to see agency on the part of the people who were discriminated against and who made profound changes in their lives.”

The effect of those choices and changes is evident throughout today’s American culture, Wilkerson argues. “Its imprint is everywhere in urban life. The configuration of the cities as we know them, the social geography of black and white neighborhoods…grew, directly or indirectly, from the response of everyone touched by the Great Migration,” she writes in the book. And then there is the artistic impact – writers like Toni Morrison and Richard Wright, noted musicians, and celebrated painters, poets, and sculptors. “There would be no jazz,” Wilkerson said. The migration made its mark politically, too, as it set the stage for the civil rights movement.

By the time Congress passed the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, more than six million African Americans had left the South. It was a marked shift in American demographics: In the 1880s, 90 percent of the country’s black population lived in the South; by the 1970s, more than half lived in the North and West. This mass movement dwarfs both the California Gold Rush of the 1850s (100,000 participants) and the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s (300,000).

Despite the staggering numbers, this chapter in American history has, in many ways, been forgotten. “In my education there was no reference to The Great Migration one way or the other,” Wilkerson said. “There might have been a passing phrase in a much larger chapter on the Harlem Renaissance, or civil rights, or the industrialization of cities overall.”

Both of Wilkerson’s parents participated in the Great Migration; they each settled in Washington, D.C. “Everybody in the neighborhood where I grew up – all of my parents’ friends, neighbors, everybody – was a part of it,” Wilkerson said. “Everybody had come up from someplace else. We were surrounded by it, but no one talked about it.”

She hopes The Warmth of Other Suns sparks a conversation. “[The book] has validated the experiences for people who had not talked about this before,” said Wilkerson, who has welcomed participants of the migration, oftentimes accompanied by their children and grandchildren, to her talks. “It’s a story of survival and resilience and fortitude that I would hope [people who lived it] would want to share.”

“Part of why people are divided is that they don’t see themselves in other people,” she continued. “They don’t see that they have a stake in other people and I see the opposite. People need to hear it over and over again. If you can see yourself in these people then that gap has been bridged.”

And that is an aim Facing History shares. “It’s a very small world,” Wilkerson said. “We’re all in this together.”

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RSVP or learn more about Isabel Wilkerson’s upcoming appearance with Facing History in Memphis, Tennessee on March 1.

Find out about our Community Conversation series in partnership with the Allstate Foundation.

This article was written by Facing History's Julia Rappaport. For questions or tips on what Facing History is doing in your community, email her at Julia_Rappaport@facing.org.