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

by Isabel Wilkerson

The people did not cross the turnstiles of customs at Ellis Island. They were already citizens. But where they came from, they were not treated as such.

But it is the larger emotional truths, the patient retelling of people’s interior lives and motivations, that are the singular gift of the accounts in this book.

Across the South, someone was

hanged or burned alive every four days from 1889 to 1929, according to the 1933 book The Tragedy of Lynching, for such alleged crimes as “stealing hogs, horse-stealing, poisoning mules, jumping labor contract, suspected of killing cattle, boastful remarks” or “trying to act like a white person.” Sixty-six were killed after being accused of “insult to a white person.” One was killed for stealing seventy-five cents.

In this atmosphere, The Clansman, a 1905 novel that was the basis of the 1915 film Birth of a Nation, became a national bestseller. It fed whites’ panic over freed blacks

not pass a white motorist on the road no matter how slowly the white motorist was going and had to take extreme

the people who left the South never exactly sat their children down to tell them these things, tell them what happened and why they left and how they and all this blood kin came to be in this northern city or

them. By the time little George was born, John was working for a planter by the name of Reshard. He was living a hard enough life as it was and had other grandchildren in his care for whom he had little patience. He liked to put

honest settlement, which did not in itself mean they got any money. “The Negro farm hand,”

Thereafter, Florida continued to live up to its position as the southernmost state with among the most heinous acts of terrorism committed anywhere in the South.

But in the early 1960s, secluded regions of the rural South—Alabama and Mississippi in particular—had become war zones in the final confrontation between segregationists and the civil rights movement.

In the General Hospital, Negro nurses attended white patients, but were segregated from white nurses in dining halls:

The reality was that Jim Crow filtered through the economy, north and south, and pressed down on poor and working-class people of all races.