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

by Isabel Wilkerson

By then nearly half of all black Americans—some forty-seven percent—would be living outside the South, compared to ten percent when the Migration began.

For all its upheaval, the Civil War had left most blacks in the South no better off economically than they had been before. Sharecropping, slavery’s replacement, kept them in debt and still bound to whatever plantation they worked.

“If it is necessary, every Negro in the state will be lynched,” James K. Vardaman, the white supremacy candidate in the 1903 Mississippi governor’s race, declared. He saw no reason for blacks to go to school. “The only effect of Negro education,” he said, “is to spoil a good field hand and make an insolent cook.” Mississippi voted Vardaman into the governor’s office and later sent him to the U.S. Senate.

Fifteen thousand men, women, and children gathered to watch eighteen-year-old Jesse Washington as he was burned alive in Waco, Texas, in May 1916. The crowd chanted, “Burn, burn, burn!” as Washington was lowered into the flames. One father holding his son on his shoulders wanted to make sure his toddler saw it. “My son can’t learn too young,” the father said.

Across the South, someone was hanged or burned alive every four days from 1889 to 1929,

Jim Crow would not get a proper burial until the enactment of federal legislation, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was nonetheless resisted years after its passage as vigorously as Reconstruction had been and would not fully take hold in many parts of the South until well into the 1970s.

back in the 1930s, estimated that only a quarter to a third of sharecroppers got an honest settlement, which did not in itself mean they got any money.

in 1950, the Florida governor’s special investigator, Jefferson Elliott, observed that there had been so many mob executions in one county that it “never had a negro live long enough to go to trial.”

“If these Negroes become doctors and merchants or buy their own farms,” a southern woman told the celebrated journalist Ray Stannard Baker, “what shall we do for servants?”

The Detroit riots went on for close to a week, ending in thirty-four deaths and more than one thousand wounded.

Some 555,000 colored people left the South during the decade of the First World War—more than all the colored people who had left in the five decades after the Emancipation Proclamation,

Fewer than one out of five sharecroppers ever saw a profit at the end of the year.

riots were often carried out by disaffected whites against groups perceived as threats to their survival. Thus riots would become to the North what lynchings were to the South,

Between 1882 and 1930, vigilantes in Florida lynched 266 black people, more than any other state,

A young colored boy sent a Christmas card to a white girl, who showed the card to her father. A posse of white men captured the boy, hogtied him, and forced the boy’s father to watch as they tortured the boy and drowned him in the river.