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

by Isabel Wilkerson

He had learned that fear when he was little and once passed the white people’s church. The kids came out of the church when they saw him. They threw rocks and bricks and called him the vilest names that could spring from a southern tongue. And he asked his grandparents, “What kind of god they got up inside that church?”

Contrary to popular convention, the migrants were more likely to be married and remain married, less likely to bear children out of wedlock, and less likely to head single-parent households than the black northerners they encountered at their destinations.

The San Francisco study found that the migrants were half as likely to be separated, divorced, or widowed as the blacks they encountered upon arrival. Overall, wherever they went, they tended to be “more family-stable compared both to those they left behind at their origin and those they encountered at their destination,” the sociologist Thomas Wilson wrote in 2001. “They are less likely to bear children outside of marriage and less likely to be divorced or separated from their spouses.”

Few experts trained their sights on the unseen masses of migrants like her, who worked from the moment they arrived, didn’t end up on welfare, stayed married because that’s what God-fearing people of their generation did whether they were happy or not, and managed not to get strung out on drugs or whiskey or a cast of nameless, no-count men.

INEZ WAS GONE, but the churchwomen bearing homemade pound cakes held little interest for George Starling.

Politicians came and went, but the problems were bigger than one local official could solve. The problems were social, economic, geographic, perhaps even moral.