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

by Isabel Wilkerson

The Jim Crow regime persisted from the 1880s to the 1960s, some eighty years, the average life span of a fairly healthy man.

And more than that, it was the first big step the nation’s servant class ever took without asking.

Blacks, though native born, were arriving as the poorest people from the poorest section of the country with the least access to the worst education.

She lived in the moment, surrendered to whatever the day presented, and remained her true, original self. Her success was spiritual, perhaps the hardest of all to achieve. And because of that, she was the happiest and lived the longest of them all.

Despite the private disappointments and triumphs of any individual migrant, the Migration, in some ways, was its own point. The achievement was in making the decision to be free and acting on that decision, wherever that journey led them.

surface. “In the simple process of walking away one by one,” wrote the scholar Lawrence R. Rodgers, “millions of African-American southerners have altered the course of their own, and all of America’s, history.”

By their actions, they did not dream the American Dream, they willed it into being by a definition of their own choosing. They did not ask to be accepted but declared themselves the Americans that perhaps few others recognized but that they had always been deep within their hearts.