Review of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson

*The Warmth of Other Suns* by Isabel Wilkerson (2010). Published by Random House.

For those of you who have never set foot virtually into this space, welcome! This is my blog, which serves as an online diary and digital archive of everything I’ve watched, read, and experienced in the past few years. Recently, it has become a source of income for me, and a crux as I faced unexpected unemployment after an opportunity I was told I had fell through. Feel free to click around if you liked this post.

Anyways, in the fall of 2024 I entered a period of what I call funemployment. I had been promised an opportunity that never materialized, after waiting three months and being assured that I would have the opportunity in the end, and once that was over, I took a hard look at my finances and realized I had enough to live my life for a bit. So I focused on this blog!

One of my favorite places to pick up books is my local branch of Savers. For those not from the US, it’s a nicer thrift store chain, and I find they have the best books for someone like me. They have a ton of history and nonfiction, and their literature section usually has someone dumping off their entire poetry collection.

So a lot of the books in my personal library actually come from Savers. During a recent trip (although this blog post will come out later), I managed to snag a copy of The Warmth of Other Suns, a book I’d been meaning to read for a long while now.

I devoured this book y’all, and I even started crying when I finished it.

Let’s get into the review—I know introductions can be long, and I don’t want to bore you before the main event.

The story of the Great Migration told through the perspective of three individuals who lived through it.

This is a rather thick book, and that’s because there’s a lot of history packed into it. But if you’re afraid of academic language, don’t be when it comes to this book—Wilkerson worked as a journalist, and the writing in this one is narrative and more accessible than the regular scholar working out of a university press.

Warmth of the Other Suns is a story about the Great Migration in American history, but we meet three individuals throughout the course of the book: Ida Mae, who left behind Mississippi for Chicago, George Starling, who fled Florida for Harlem, and Robert Foster, who left behind Louisiana for California.

Each chapter alternates between the three, with it going in chronological order of their lives. We start from when they are in the South, and for the sake of my sanity, I’m going to go through each of the three.

First is Ida Mae. Her husband is a sharecropper, and their entire families live in Mississippi, where they notice injustices going on all around. Even when a cousin is accused of a crime he did not commit, he is punished severely, leading to his entire life being messed up.

After the cousin incident, Ida Mae and her husband realize they need to get out of the area. Picking cotton isn’t going to sustain them forever in this system, and when they ultimately decide to leave their lives here behind, they have to keep it a secret. Many Blacks had to keep it a secret, as the white people would try to stop them.

Ida Mae and her husband would end up in Chicago, which led to more struggles in the long run, but the chance of a better life. Even as they look out their window and see crime, which runs rampant, but it’s still more opportunity than the lives they had, even if they had to work hard in the North, too.

George is next. He would pick oranges in the groves with his buddies back in Florida, but when they started demanding more pay and rights, creating a little union effort, which puts them clashing against the white owners of the picking company. They’re all vastly underpaid, so what they did is right, but when the white owners catch wind of what’s happening, they come after George and his friends.

George had really wanted his education, but his father disagreed. He even married someone as a desperate bid to try and go back to school, Inez, even though they weren’t compatible. So when George jumps on a train north, it solidifies his fate in Harlem, as he brings his wife, and eventual kids, into the community of Harlem. He’ll get a job as a train porter going between the north and south, and he’ll see firsthand the impacts of segregation and then desegregation.

Our last person we focus on is Robert Foster. Born in Louisiana, he was brilliant and worked his way up into becoming a doctor, but in the south he didn’t want to be a home doctor. He married a high society Black woman, the daughter of a high up at an HBCU, and Robert wanted to provide for her.

So he prepared to move his family out West, as he believed he could openly be a doctor in Los Angeles, and that there was less discrimination there. He drives all the way there only to realize there are still color barriers, but like Ida Mae and George, he’s going to claw his way up to a position where he can comfortably raise his family.

Overall Thoughts

This is such a long book, but in the span of a week I was reading it nonstop. Seriously, if you want to humanize the Great Migration, this is such a good pick up. As I mentioned before, I was crying when I finished it because every human’s life has to come to an end, and these are people who lived over a hundred years ago.

At the same time, these are only three stories, but they represent millions who went North or West in search of something better. They found different forms of racism, but these three managed to carve lives out for themselves and their families, even if it wasn’t the happiest one (as we see with George and Robert especially).

I suggest buying a copy of the book (from your local independent bookstore preferably) and savoring it slowly if you haven’t already. I found this book to be so worth it, and I will return to it in the future.

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