The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

by Isabel Wilkerson

sociologist Gunnar Myrdal called the Northern Paradox. In the North, Myrdal wrote, “almost everybody is against discrimination in general, but, at the same time, almost everybody practices discrimination in his own personal affairs”—that is, by not allowing blacks into unions or clubhouses, certain jobs, and white neighborhoods, indeed, avoiding social interaction overall.

But after the sit-ins and marches in the South, things were beginning to change. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act on July 2, 1964, 101 years after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation granting rights that would have to be spelled out again long after Lincoln was gone.

The civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s changed all that, or was intended to. But custom had a way of lingering well after the ink was dry. So in the transition to integration, black passengers were not automatically granted the right to keep their seats no matter what their ticket or President Johnson said.

By the time the Migration reached its conclusion, sociologists would have a name for that kind of hard-core racial division. They would call it hypersegregation, a kind of separation of the races that was so total and complete that blacks and whites rarely intersected outside of work. The top ten cities that would earn that designation after the 1980 census (the last census after the close of the Great Migration, which statistically ended in the 1970s) were, in order of severity of racial isolation from most segregated to least: (1) Chicago, (2) Detroit, (3) Cleveland, (4) Milwaukee, (5) Newark, (6) Gary, Indiana, (7) Philadelphia, (8) Los Angeles, (9) Baltimore, and (10) St. Louis—all of them receiving stations of the Great Migration.

But with the stroke of a pen, many eastern and southern Europeans and their children could wipe away their ethnicities—and those limiting assumptions—by adopting Anglo-Saxon surnames and melting into the world of the more privileged native-born whites. In this way, generations of immigrant children could take their places without the burdens of an outsider ethnicity in a less enlightened era. Doris von Kappelhoff could become Doris Day, and Issur Danielovitch, the son of immigrants from Belarus, could become Kirk Douglas, meaning that his son could live life and pursue stardom as Michael Douglas instead of as Michael Danielovitch. A name change would have had no effect in masking the ethnicity of black migrants like Ida Mae, George, and Robert. It would have been superfluous, given that their surnames, often inherited from the masters of their forebears, were already Anglo-Saxon. They did not have the option of choosing for themselves a more favored identity.

Black migrants did not have the same shot at craft unions or foreman jobs or country clubs or exclusive cul-de-sac lacecurtain neighborhoods that other immigrants could enter if they were of a mind to do so. A daughter of white ethnics could instantly escape the perceived disadvantages of her origins by marrying a man of northern or western European descent and taking his surname. She and whatever children she bore could thus assume the identity of a more privileged caste.

With the exception of extraordinarily light-skinned blacks passing into the white world for these very same privileges, the daughter of the average black migrants would gain no such advantage by intermarrying. She would still be seen as black and be subject to the scrutiny of the outside world, no matter whom she married or whose name she took.

Ultimately, according to the Harvard immigration scholar Stanley Lieberson, a major difference between the acceptance and thus life outcomes of black migrants from the South and their white immigrant counterparts was this: white immigrants and their descendants could escape the disadvantages of their station if they chose to, while that option did not hold for the vast majority of black migrants and their children.

In 1950, blacks in the North and West made a median annual income of $1,628, compared to Italian immigrants, who made $2,295, Czechs, who made $2,339, Poles, who made $2,419, and Russians, who made $2,717. “There is just no avoiding the fact that blacks were more severely discriminated against in the labor market and elsewhere,” Lieberson wrote. They “had to work more hours to earn less money than anyone else,” the historian Gilbert Osofsky wrote. The people of the Great Migration had farther to climb because they started off at the lowest rung

Black southerners stepped into a hierarchy that assigned them a station beneath everyone else, no matter that their families had been in the country for centuries.

He had made it up north, alright, as he had dreamed so long ago. But he had an unhappy wife who could not be made happy and two teenage children who were good at heart but had been swallowed up by the worst aspects of the North and South while he and his wife were out working long hours to give the kids a life they themselves had never had. He had a two-year-old by another woman that he had to support and a decent-paying but dead-end job as essentially a servant to railroad passengers needing help with their luggage, directions to their seats, another pillow, their shoes shined.

but just missed the revolution that opened up the best in education and unheard-of career opportunities for black people with the passage of the civil rights laws of the 1960s. The revolution had come too late for him. He was in his midforties when the Civil Rights Act was signed and close to fifty when its effects were truly felt.

George practically had a second family, distant though he was, now that he had a son by another woman. But he stayed in the marriage out of a distorted sense of honor and duty rather than truly wanting to be there, and Inez had to live with that, too. The New World had been a land of milk and honey, of a hard-won measure of freedom and working-class achievements—the Harlem brownstone, the insurance policies and certificates of deposit, the upstairs tenants who brought in extra income, the furniture, cars, and appliances, the steady if monotonous jobs that impressed the folks back home—but they had come at a steep price.

When alice died, so did the highbrow social theater she and Robert had shared in Los Angeles. Robert would no longer keep open the private salons of the finest department stores to find some heavily beaded gown for Alice.

Both of George’s children went in the opposite direction from the one George had taken, went back to the place he had left and made decisions he couldn’t understand.

The craziness has Ida Mae hemmed in on all sides. When she leaves to go to church, if she goes to buy groceries, if she takes a walk to get some exercise, the drug dealers and lookout boys greet her as she leaves and welcome her when she gets back. When she hears sirens or gunshots, she runs to the window to see what has happened now. She is an eyewitness to a war playing out on the streets below her.

They call her “Grandma” and tell her not to come out on certain days.

But the longer he talks, the more comfortable he gets and the more he sounds like the southerner he is inside.

He has made his mistakes, plenty of them, but he alone has made them and has lived with the consequences of exercising his own free will, which could be said to be the very definition of freedom.

So when, in 1996, a young constitutional lawyer and community activist from Hyde Park ran for the Illinois State Senate seat in District 13, Ida Mae, voting her usual straight Democratic ticket, would become among the first people ever to have voted for the man. She would not have to give it much thought. He did not have Chicago roots and the name was unusual—Barack Obama. But he was running unopposed, having edged out the woman who had asked him to run in her place before changing her mind. His wife, Michelle, had grown up in South Shore, in the more stable section of bungalows further to the west. So Ida Mae and an overwhelming majority of the Democratic stronghold of predominantly black South Shore voted him into office as their state senator.

It was Kenny, George’s younger son, whose conception had broken Inez’s heart. And that heartbreak kept him from feeling part of the family or ever truly knowing his father. Before George took ill, Kenny went to George and let him know how he was doing. Kenny was married, had kids, was living in the Bronx. He told him he had converted to Islam, had changed his name to Amjad Mujaahid,

That evening, the sun fell behind the horizon and made what looked like streaks of fire across the sky after George Starling was returned for the last time to the Florida earth he had fled.

Coming to Chicago was a guarantee that you would not be picking cotton.

Ida Mae Gladney, Robert Foster, and George Starling each left different parts of the South during different decades for different reasons and with different outcomes. The three of them would find some measure of happiness, not because their children had been perfect, their own lives without heartache, or because the North had been particularly welcoming. In fact, not a single one of those things had turned out to be true.

There had been sickness, disappointment, premature and unexpected losses, and, among their children, more divorces than enduring marriages, but at least the children had tried.

The three who had come out of the South were left widowed but solvent, and each found some measure of satisfaction because whatever had happened to them, however things had unfolded, it had been of their own choosing, and they could take comfort in that. They believed with all that was in them that they were better off for having made the Migration, that th...

Mississippi was deep inside her, but she gave no thought to ever living there again. Home was wherever she planted herself, and that happened to be Chicago.

people the world over were enriched by the music the migrants carried north with them and, through translation, became—from Louis Armstrong to Miles Davis to Aretha Franklin to the Rolling Stones to Tupac Shakur, and many others—essentially the soundtrack of the twentieth century.

did the Great Migration achieve the aim of those who willed it? Were the people who left the South—and their families—better off for having done so?

Throughout the Migration, social scientists all but concluded that the answer to those questions was no, that the Migration had led to the troubles of the urban North and West, most scholars blaming the dysfunction of the inner cities on the migrants themselves. The migrants were cast as poor illiterates who imported out-of-wedlock births, joblessness, and welfare dependency wherever they went.

Newly available census records suggest the opposite to be true. According to a growing body of research, the migrants were, it turns out, better educated than those they left behind in the South and, on the whole, had nearly as many years of schooling as those they encountered in the North.

Compared to the northern blacks already there, the migrants were more likely to be married and remain married, more likely to raise their children in two-parent households, and more likely to be employed.

The migrants, as a group, managed to earn higher incomes than northern-born blacks even though they were relegate...

They were less likely to be on welfare than the blacks they encountered in the North, partly because they had come so far, had experienced such hard times, and were willing to work longer hours or second jobs in positions that few northern blacks, or hardly anyone else for that matter, wanted, as was the case with Ida M...

The first black mayors in each of the major receiving cities of the North and West were not longtime northern native blacks or those having arrived from the Caribbean but participants or sons of the Great Migration.

Over time, the Migration would transform American music as we know it. The three most influential figures in jazz were all children of the Great Migration. Miles Davis

Thelonious Monk

John Co...

“Compared with northern-born blacks,” Tolnay wrote in 2003 as a result of his continuing research, “southern migrants had higher rates of participation in the labor force, lower levels of unemployment, higher incomes, lower levels of poverty and welfare dependency.”

“independent studies are in unanimous agreement with the present finding that southern-born blacks are more economically successful in the North than northern-born blacks.”

Each of the three people in this book represented some aspect of the emigrant psyche, of the patterns of adjustment facing anyone who has ever left one place for another, desperate to make a go of it.

Robert Foster found financial success and walked taller in a land more suited to him. But he turned his back on the South and the culture he sprang from. He rarely went back. He plunged himself fully into an alien world that only partly accepted him and went so far as to change his name and assume a different persona to fit in. It left him a rootless soul, cut off from the good things about the place he had left.

In later life, he hungered for any news or reminder of home, like many an exile.

George Starling succeeded merely by not being lynched. Just living was an achievement. He managed to reach a level of material solvency he might never have known in the South, assuming he had survived.

Ida Mae Gladney had the humblest trappings but was perhaps the richest of them all. She had lived the hardest life, been given the least education, seen the worst the South could hurl at her people, and did not let it break her. She lived longer in the North than in the South but never forsook her origins, never changed the person she was deep inside, never changed her accent, speaking as thick a Mississippi drawl in her nineties as the day she caught the train out of Okolona sixty-odd years before.

She was surrounded by the clipped speech of the North, the crime on the streets, the flight of the white people from her neighborhood, but it was as if she were immune to it all. She took the best of what she saw in the North and the South and interwove them in the way she saw fit.

From the moment the first migrants set foot in the North during World War I, scholars began weighing in on the motivations of people like Ida Mae, George, and Robert—whether it was the pull of the North or the push of the South, whether they were driven by economics or by injustice and persecution, whether changes in cotton production started the Migration or merely hastened what was already under way, and whether the Migration would end, as some wrongly anticipated, with World War I.

the exodus forced change in the South, albeit a slow and fitful one, almost from the start: the number of lynchings in the South declined in each successive decade of the Great Migration as the number of black departures went up. Though the violence would continue into the 1960s and there were many factors that figured into that form of vigilantism, it took less than a decade of migration to begin making a difference.

The timing of the Great Migration alone raises questions as to whether changes in cotton harvesting caused the Migration or whether it was the Migration that in fact set off changes in cotton production. The mechanical cotton picker did not exist when the exodus began. The Migration had been under way for some thirty years before the first viable prototypes were actually in use in the fields.

The exodus of black southerners accelerated the drive toward finding a machine that could do what the pickers did. In the race toward an alternative, inventors registered nearly five hundred patents between 1901 and 1931, the early decades of the Migration, for some version of a hoped-for machine to pick cotton.