“The Warmth of Other Suns” is Wilkerson’s first book. Says, the well-known “migrant advantage” has worked historically for Americans of all colors. Or that the migrants had higher employment numbers than Northern-born blacks and a more stable family life, as shown by lower divorce rates and fewer children born outside of marriage. It is no surprise, therefore, to find census data showing that blacks who left the South had far more schooling than blacks Wilkerson writes, was their heroic determination to roll the dice for a better future. Today, these black migrants are viewed as a modern version of the Europeans who flooded America’s shores in the late 1800s and early 1900s. “The migrants were cast as poor illiterates,” Wilkerson says, “who imported out-of-wedlock births, joblessness and welfare dependencyīut the more recent scholarship, which Wilkerson embraces, tells another story. Rural roots and thrown together in dead-end Northern slums. Arguments raged for decades about the tangled pathology of black families divided from their Franklinįrazier fretted over the “ignorant, uncouth and impoverished” throngs that had invaded his beloved Chicago. Even the distinguished black sociologist E. For many years, commentators routinely demeaned these migrants as the dregs of a failed society. Wilkerson knows well the highly charged nature of this field. Her mother left rural Georgia, her father southern Virginia, to settle in Washington, D.C. Wilkerson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing at The New York Times in 1994 and currently teaches journalism at Boston University, has a personal stake in the story. Prophetic words, indeed, Isabel Wilkerson insists in “The Warmth of Other Suns,” her massive and masterly account of the Great Migration.

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