Our national mythology is a story of otherness merging into assimilation leading to individuality. The colonists differed from their British brothers and sisters, and were different than the Indians. They learned how to survive in a new and forbidding land, and established a society where personal initiative could trump origins. Germans, Italians, Irish, Poles, Swedes, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, so many others—we’ve moved in as strangers, figured out how to make it, and then made ourselves over.

That leaves out Africans—at least the majority of African-Americans. These days, new African immigrants often simulate the same trajectory as other immigrant groups. Look at all the Ethiopian restaurants in Seattle if you don’t believe me.

In the past, Africans came here with those first British colonists—generally not by choice. They’ve never been strangers to the United States. They have been other. Different color. Systematically cheated of the chance to advance through personal initiative. Bound, both literally and figuratively, by origin.

History is never so simplistic, however. In ‘The Warmth of Other Suns,’ Isabel Wilkerson makes a strong case for the immigrant experience of blacks—how they fled poverty and persecution in the South for American cities of the North, bonded with each other in their own neighborhoods for support, and worked hard to prove themselves as individuals.

After the arrival of the first Africans, after three hundred years of involuntary servitude, the changing social structure that came with World War I—jobs in the North and accessible transportation to get there from the South—finally allowed blacks to do what the Germans and the Italians and the Irish did: escape a place where there were too few opportunities, go to one where they had a chance at a new life, and make names for themselves through personal achievement.

The significance of the Great Migration has gone unnoticed and unrecognized. There’s a misconception that the movement north led to welfare mothers and crack cocaine. Wilkerson quotes Daniel Moynihan’s Department of Labor report from 1965, which called the urban influx of southern migrants ‘a tangle of pathology.’

Moynihan was merely reinforcing a popular, if stereotypical, view. Wilkerson cites a 1920s economist who found that ‘migrants were untrained, often illiterate, and generally void of culture.’ In ‘The Negro Family in Chicago, 1939,’ the well-known sociologist E. Franklin Frazier opined that new arrivals from the South were ‘inarticulate and resigned,’ causing a ‘disorganiztion of Negro life’ that seemed ‘at times to be a disease.’

Inaccurate, writes Wilkerson. ‘The general laws of migration,’ she holds, are ‘that the greater the obstacles and the farther the distance traveled, the more ambitious the migrants.’ The South clearly ‘erected some of the highest barriers to migration,’ and the evidence, from census figures, surveys, and studies, paints a picture of predominantly urban migrants, better educated and higher on the socioeconomic scale than the blacks already residing in northern cities.

But ‘The Warmth of Other Suns’ is not grounded in statistical argument. The Great Migration is unwieldy and amorphous, not only due to false perceptions. Spanning more than half a century and a whole country, it’s hard to pin down in time and space. Those involved often fail to see themselves as part of an historical movement. Wilkerson wants her readers to feel its sweep and impact on an intimate level, through the stories of real migrants.

To do so, she narrows her scope to three migrants, who left different locations in the South to journey to different northern (and western) cities at different times. Each of these stories—Ida Mae Gladney moving to Chicago from Mississippi in 1937, George Starling from Florida to New York City in 1945, and Robert Foster from Louisiana to Los Angeles in 1953—is fascinating, and each of the protagonists is intriguing.

Instead of separating the narratives, though, Wilkerson interweaves them. For example, the section of her book titled ‘Exodus’ recounts all three leave-takings from the South. The need to loop chronolocially and spatially as stories jump back and forth in time and place can be a little confusing. The author seems to be aware of this, occasionally resorting to repetition. The repetition can be slightly irritating.

Nevertheless, when she gets into each of her three stories, Wilkerson’s present-tense prose is beautifully crafted, immediate, and engaging. You can feel her affection for, and sometimes even her frustration with, her subjects. She carefully listens to them recount their tales, contextualizes those tales in the history of the times, and directly connects to their import, bonding herself and her readers to the humiliations and the honors, the victories and the defeats.

Wlkerson gives this great movement the overdue recognition it deserves. ‘Despite the private disappointments and triumphs of any individual migrant,’ she writes, ‘the Migration, in some ways, was its own point. The achievement was in making the decision to be free and acting on that decision…’

That achievement was surely the catalyst leading to the major contributions African-Americans have made, and continue to make, to our country’s culture and politics.