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

by Isabel Wilkerson

Jesse Washington

They would come to be called Jim Crow laws. It is unknown precisely who Jim Crow was or if someone by that name actually existed. There are several stories as to the term’s origins. It came into public use in the 1830s after Thomas Dartmouth Rice, a New York–born itinerant white actor, popularized a song-and-dance routine called “the Jim Crow” in minstrel shows across the country. He wore blackface and ragged clothes and performed a jouncy, palsied imitation of a handicapped black stable hand he had likely seen in his travels singing a song about “Jumping Jim Crow.” Jim Crow was said to be the name of either the stable hand or his owner living in Kentucky or Ohio. Rice became a national sensation impersonating a crippled black man, but died penniless in 1860 of a paralytic condition that limited his speech and movement by the end of his life.

So the boss men went without new Model T Fords. The sharecroppers went without shoes.

Beautiful writing

It carried so many southern blacks north that Chicago would go from 1.8 percent black at the start of the twentieth century to one-third black by the time the flow of people finally began to slow in 1970. Detroit’s black population would skyrocket from 1.4 percent to 44 percent during the era of the Migration.

His back pinched from days and nights of driving. His fingers were sore from clutching the steering wheel. His wrists ached, and still there was more road. The road would not end.

Great writing

The sister had been in Milwaukee only a couple of years herself, having followed her husband, the third one, Richard, there in 1935. Ida Mae and her family

The author is a great writer

Some started talking their version of a northern accent, sitting up straighter, eating their chicken wings with their pinkie out, becoming more like the place they were heading to. “A lot of them pretending to be always northerners,” George said, knowing full well the difference.

Humans are the same the world all over and across generations

“I don’t have no flashlight that’s gonna last long enough for you to find all your clothes,” George said. “ ’Cause they rolling all over the train. And I need my flashlight. I’m sorry, man.”

“To hell with what people think of me. Go on and do what you wanna do. They gonna do what they wanna do anyhow,

say what they wanna say anyway.”

“Just blow ’em outta the water, ’cause I’ll go on and do what I wanna do.”

James Earl Ray,