The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson

This was a very long audiobook that took me several weeks (on and off) to listen to, but it was well worth it. It’s a very detailed (though for a general audience, not scholarly) analysis of the Great Migration, the movement of Black people from the American south beginning during the First World War and continuing until the civil rights era in the 1960s and early 70s. The breadth and scope of this book is impressive, sweeping through several decades of American history and looking at the reasons for the migration and the impacts of it in many different Northern and Western cities where the migrants settled. However, this broad scope is balanced by a personal focus: out of the many migrants Wilkerson interviewed in the 1990s when most were elderly, she chose three individuals — one woman and two men — who all migrated from different places in the South, to different Northern cities, in different decades (the 30s, 40s and 50s), and traces each of their stories throughout their lives. Telling the story in this way — three individual histories unfolding against the background of the much bigger story of two or three generations of migrants seeking freedom and better lives — makes the whole movement come alive for the reader. We see the horrific Jim Crow-era racism that forced these people to leave — and also the more veiled but just as real racism that they faced in the North upon arrival. This book is social history at its best and I learned so much from it.