Constant Reader discussion
Reading List
>
Warmth Of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
Kitty, Thanks for the questions and link to the interview. I am reading slowly since I started back to teaching in the end of August. I think the book is magnificent, but I have trouble dipping in and out. I'm actually thinking of reading each narrative separately not. I'm on about page 130. So I'll start with Ida Mae's story. I did know about the migration--mainly through teaching family history in a very diverse school...and I also knew about Jim Crow laws, but I didn't know how quickly they began after the Civil War. I have a book called The New Jim Crow on my TBR list. It's about the mass incarceration of black men for crimes like using and selling drugs...crimes which have far less impact on white male polulations. A new way to disenfranchise black men--to make buying a house, getting an education and getting employment extremely difficult. Now that's something I had never considered in exactly that way. It will be interesting to read these books back to back. While I think the author weaves the three narratives and historical context together brilliantly, I just don't have the kind of time and attention the book demands and deserves, so I will read in my my own way. Given my personal experiences of racism, this book is heartbreaking. And I'm white. I think about how it must be to be a black American reading this book. It seems to me to be essential reading. So many privileges we take for granted as white people, including not having to "take it" when we are treated unfairly because of our race.
I'm a little over halfway through, and enjoying this book much more than I thought I would. Altho "enjoying" is not really the right word. I am horrified.
I had a hard time reading at length during the first half, it made me so angry. Later, when they are established in their new homes, it's still hard for the migrants, but it seems less horrific.
I read this this book a little while back and found it a superb blending of serious academic research and deeply felt storytelling. I found all three narratives compelling. They spoke eloquently and intelligently of the profound struggles that were lived out in the lives of millions of others under the oppressive shadow of Jim Crow.I first heard about the Great Migration back sometime in the sixties. Studs Terkel devoted a week of his radio program to interviews of residents of Chicago who had made the journey. It made an impression on me and I still can recall some of those interviews. The Great Migration was also the backdrop for a couple books I read during the same time period, Native Son and Go Tell it on the Mountain
Jane, I'm currently reading Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. It's a book that deals with the organized system of virtual re-enslavement that was introduced in the late 1870's and lasted to the beginning of the Second World War. Selective arrests of African-American males on minor charges often resulted in years of incarceration and the penal system auctioned off leases of prisoners to cotton farmers, lumber concerns and mining companies. In fact U.S. Steel was one of the largest holders of these "leases," using the virtual slave labor in their mines and steel plants in the Birmingham area.
Kitty, I think that the African-American influence is an essential part of the American experience. It has influenced our culture in ways that we often don't even recognize. Jazz, of course, is perhaps the single most important serious contribution that America has made to the world of music. It was a major influence on the sensibility that lead to modernist movement in the twenties and thirties. But there have been major contributions in all fields of the arts. Indeed, the African-American influence affects things as basic to who we are as the food we eat and the way we talk.
Just compare a dozen American authors to a dozen Brits and more often than not you can hear the difference. My guess is that a big part of the distinctive American voice is our essentially mongrel heritage-and I mean mongrel in the most positive way
I feel that way also Brian, it is what makes us distinctive, I think. I found it disconcerting that non-whites and women were considered to be uneducable. As we know "Education" and I do mean to capitalized it, is a grand equalizer, as Horace Mann so aptly stated.At first I was put off by all the jumping around, then I realized Wilkerson might have wanted her readers to feel the uncertainty these people felt.
What do you think about Ida and her family trying to buy a house in an all white community and all the whites moved out? I think it was a case of the North not putting it's money where it's mouth was. Do you think Lincoln would have brought about emancipation a lot sooner than 100 years or so later? I know we can presume, but it would have been interesting .
I recently read a book by Chang Rae Lee. He stated that all men eventually are the same color in death,(black).
I do feel African -Americans have contributed and worked harder to be on an equal footing. They worked two and three jobs to bring family north only to find subtle and not so subtle ways of discrimination still.
I am curious about the book that George Washington Carver wrote. He was insistent that the people should stay in the south and make it better. Do you think that was realistic? Why did he make a statement like that?
I admit that in the first 100 pages, I kept getting a couple of the men confused. Perhaps it was the fact that two of the men, one being Ida Mae's husband, both were named George. But then they went off on their respective migrations, and the narrative pushed me forward. Really, what an amazing book. She did 1,200 interviews in the making of the book. I wonder how she settled on these three individuals. Is it perhaps the fact that they all lived until the mid 90s, and thus were interviewable? Or was there other reasons?I grew up near DC, where vestiges of Jim Crow, signs for colored waterfountains persisted into the 1960s. As bad as that is, I have friends who grew up in more northern places like Wisconsin and Boston, who seem to feel that their communities didn't have such problems. I think they are sorely mistaken, and this book tells the tale.
Isabel Wilkerson will be part of the local lecture series in January. I am so glad that I've read this book. I agree with Jane about this being essential reading.
What's disturbing to me, is how much of it was around into the 1950's. I was born in 1935. I graduated from high school in 1953. I was living in the San Fernando Valley, which she says did a good job of keeping blacks out. Why didn't I know any of this? I must have been walking around in my own safe white middle-class bubble.
I was in NC as a child and I saw a lot of what is described. I was fortunate enough to have parents who realized racism was wrong, even though they were marinated in it in all parts of their lives and still had bits of racism clinging to them. As a child my father was beaten by his mother because he had a black child as a friend and wouldn't stay away from his house. I remember my uncle showing me where the slave quarters had been on the family farm. I remember when I was in first grade we took a field trip to the office of the Superintendent of schools who told us the old used textbooks from the high school were sent to the black high school. The reason she gave was that the black children wouldn't take care of new books. Even then that excuse sounded way off to me. I wanted to ask her how she knew this. Black people only had jobs on farms, and I know I worked as a tobacco worker from the time I was about 11 until I moved to Baltimore when I was 16. I made a grand 45 cents an hour. For a kid that was fine, but it was also what the black workers made to live on. I could go on ad nauseum. MAP, did you read the section at the end of the book where she describes her methodology? If I remember correctly, she picked those three examples because they were all from different parts of the South, and they went to different parts of the North. They had different ranges of success and failure and their stories were pretty compelling. Their voices were very distinct, once you got to know them.
I’m only up to page 270 and will keep reading. I did want to chime in with a few thoughts though.I was born in the mid 1950’s and raised in FAR northeast Philadelphia, PA- almost to the outer edges of the city in a predominantly white, Jewish and Catholic neighborhood. Being Protestant I remember what a huge deal it was when formal “living room dialogue” groups were formed to help the Protestant and Catholics to understand and accept each other better. Several years later my future mother-in –law called my mother the week before our wedding concerned that I’d drag her son down to hell because I wasn’t Catholic. In other homes it wasn’t unheard of for Jewish families to disown as if dead a child who married a Christian. I bring this up because even within what would appear to be a homogenous white demographic in what was perceived as the squeaky clean, Father Knows Best era, whole groups of people had mistrust of other groups for what today would we’d deem as insignificant. The difference of skin color was a far greater, insurmountable chasm although I didn’t realize it at the time.
The black kids sat at the same table together in the lunchroom when my high school had busing to to help achieve integration. Naïve as I was, I assumed they kept to themselves because they wanted to; kids tend to form cliques anyway for one reason or another. In retrospect, I can only imagine how isolated they must have felt. A few minutes ago, I counted the faces in my high school yearbook from 1972. There were 850 white-faced graduating seniors; I spotted only 5 black faces. There may have been more black kids in our class who didn’t graduate or dropped out. If that was the case could you blame them?
In my early twenties there was a coworker who appeared to hate me just because I was white. I was frustrated thinking to myself, “I didn’t do anything to you. I wasn’t even alive at the time or had any relatives that had anything to do with slavery.” I had no idea Jim Crow laws existed in the south. I’d vaguely heard about lynchings in the south- long ago. As a young person I thought all that was ancient history. I really had no concept such atrocities persisted into my lifetime.
When I said in post #8 that I didn't know any of this, I didn't mean I didn't know there were Jim Crow laws, or that blacks were not treated well. I meant that I thought that was restricted to the South. At the time, I had no idea that these injustices were operating in Southern California. What operated to maintain my innocence?
Ruth, I expect it was because it was a dirty "little" (not so very little) secret truth. It was one of those unspoken things. Out of sight out of mind.
As I read these posts, I realize once again that I want to hear other voices. I know there are some people of color on Goodreads, but it seems there are few, and I wonder why, and I wonder about how to encourage other voices to participate. Does anyone have any thoughts?
We thought it was the way things were supposed to be. One of my neighbors had a maid who must have gotten up before dawn to take a bus to our suburb. She probably had kids of her own, but who thought about that? I know my mother disapproved, but I doubt that was from enlightened thinking, but rather a desire to keep our little neighborhood status quo.Sherry, I read the methodology just this morning, but missed the reference you cited. Now the book is back at the library!
One of the parts of the book I liked the most was the description of how the migration impacted politics. People who were never allowed the vote came north and found their votes courted. And it was the Democrats who wanted their votes, while in the south the same party was the Dixiecrats, practically identical to the Jim Crow devotees.
I an still reading, but I love this book. I was born in Washington, DC, in 1949, and my parents, as well as the parents of almost all of my friends, were from the south. My father was born in 1911 in rural VA. His education was begun there in a one-room schoolhouse where the teacher was his aunt. Aunt Cora never married, but instead taught the children of her 4 brothers and their children as well as the other black children in the area. From my father and his 6 cousins (all male - girls are rare in my father's family) came a scientist (my father), one of the founders of Goddard Space Flight Center, a provost of the U. of Michigan at Dearborn and an Army colonel, as well as one cousin who, when he enlisted in the army in WWII, was entered as "white" on the forms, decided to go for it, and was lost to the family. All of them had to leave the south to attend high school - my father went to high school in Scranton, PA. He began college at Penn State, but transferred to historically black Howard university in Washington, DC. He has very little money and lived on one meal a day, but excelled in chemistry to the extent that his nickname was "Test Tube". When he graduated, the only job available to him was operating an elevator.Meanwhile, my mother was born in Dennison, TX, in 1919. In her tiny town, her parents were leaders in the black community. In addition to working for the railroad, my grandfather, with my grandmother, had various businesses in the 1920's including a store and a movie theater for the black community. When my mother went to college, he first went to a historically black college that followed Booker T. Washington's philosophy of staying within one's "place", separately, in order to build the black community. Because of this, my mother was allowed to study chemistry, but she also had to learn broom making so that she could earn a living. You would have to know my mother to know how much she hated this! She transferred to Fisk University which advocated high academic achievement for the "best and brightest". She had hoped to study medicine at Meharry Medical School, also a historically black school near Fisk, but by this time the Great Depression had seriously depleted family resources and she went home to Texas to teach elementary school. She was utterly miserable - in her words, she "ate pies and cried". She tried to get a job at a number of chemical companies but none were hiring black women, to say the least. Her opportunity came when jobs were vacated by men going to war in WWII and the US Government began to hire black people and women to fill these slots. She was hired by the National Bureau of Standards in Washington and was thrilled to go. She immediately loved DC - Wilkerson mentions how everyone had pictures taken,and I have a picture of my mother, dressed to kill and with impeccably manicured hands, from her earliest days in DC. The condition of her employment was that she pass an exam in Chemistry a few months after she was hired, and the person who helped her sharpen her skills for the test was, of course, my father, who had also been hired by the Bureau of Standards by this time. He had stayed in DC - nobody was going back south after DC! - and was hired in the WWII period as well. They fell in love over chemistry and got married.
Both of my parents has excellent careers in science working for the US government, but of course they both encountered plenty of discrimination in the process. My father always wanted to earn a PhD in chemistry and excelled in classes at Catholic University, but he was called in by the administration there and told that he could take all the classes he wanted, but that they would never grant a PhD to a black person. My mother filed more EEOC complaints that you could count. Both were passed over repeatedly for promotions in favor of people that they had trained. But their lives were immeasurably improved by being a part of the Great Migration, and I loved growing up in DC.
Mina, your parents sound like they could have come straight from this book!
Mina, thanks for taking the time to write your history. Ruth's right, it could have been in the book. How tenacious both your parents were.
What a beautiful legacy Mina. Their love of education , thankfully they did achieve most of their goals, are something to be proud of. I suppose you could say they had the right chemistry.
What is masterful about this book is how it draws you in like a novel. I almost wasn't going to read it, afraid it would be another earnest sociological study with all the juice sucked out of it.
If white farmers are not able to make a decent living , how do they expect the black farmer to be any different. I know the family farms are becoming extinct.Mind you it is a lofty idea but is it realistic?
Thank you, Mina, for posting your parents' story. And even with your parents' struggle, I'm sure that there were many, many African Americans who were stuck in elevator operator type jobs.
Ruth wrote: "What is masterful about this book is how it draws you in like a novel. I almost wasn't going to read it, afraid it would be another earnest sociological study with all the juice sucked out of it."I agree, Ruth. Wilkerson does a beautiful job of making the lives of the people in this book real and fully developed. These stories are the stories of so many, and I am so happy that Wilkerson captured them now, before the generation of the Great Migration is gone.
I've read again and again of the Jim Crow laws in the south. Even read novels in which they played a prominent part. But nothing I've ever read prepared me for the reality as described by Wilkerson. Man's inhumanity to man. It hit me right in the gut.
I have read that this book is destined to become a classic. I am glad I read it and that I bought a hardback. Does any one know what piece of work won the Pulitzer Prize? Was it this book?
Ruth wrote, "What's disturbing to me, is how much of it was around into the 1950's. I was born in 1935. I graduated from high school in 1953. I was living in the San Fernando Valley, which she says did a good job of keeping blacks out. "I graduated high school in 1951, but didn't get interested in that kind of goings on until the 1960s, when there was a lot of controversy over the Vietnam War and certain types of discrimination. I remember reading that real estate mortgages for certain areas in California contained clauses that forbade the sale of the property to blacks (and I think certain other groups). I believe it was the Earl Warren Supreme Court that shot that down.
I hadn't planned to read this book as it sounded rather boring. But listening to all the discussion, it sounds anything but boring.
Marge
Marge it is about history in the making. A remarkable feat to do without it being dry. I think those that have and will read it will come away with a better understanding of racial backgrounds and relationships. I tried to find the source again so maybe someone will know the legislative act that forbade land grants during the western expansion. It forbade Blacks , Mexicans, Indians, Catholics and Jews from having land granted to them from the Federal Government. They could go west but they had to purchase the land outright. Indians were, as we know granted land ,but it was inhospitable for habitation, so it might as well have been no land.
I'm not sure who mentioned it above, but I also remember the times in the 1950's when there was suspicion and curiosity among religious groups. Living in a Boston suburb, it was the Catholics and Jews who were the odd ones at that time. I was born in 1948. I recall when a black family of a military officer moved into a new home in one of the "good" neighborhoods. I think most of the city was shocked when racist messages were written over the house. I believe this must have been about 1960. Up til then I think there were probably only 1 or 2 blacks or black families in town, but they probably lived in an "appropriate" place. As far as I know, this never happened again and I believe this family did move in and stay.
I am so glad I read this book. It not only gives me a better history on the Jim Crow south, it gives me a better history of the changes in the north during the same period when I was really unaware.
I, too, feel this should be required reading.
I absolutely loved the description of Pershing when he was at Morehouse, out after the homecoming game with friends, drunk and standing in the middle of the street."He was in Atlanta in the middle of the night, far from the stooping and yessums of Monroe. He was surrounded by a whole campus of somebodies like him and doing whatever he pleased. ...Pershing did not know precisely where he would end up or how. But he knew at that moment that he would never live in another country Jim Crow town again. He would do whatever it took to get as far away as he could." (p. 117 - 118)
So many people of the Great Migration felt exactly the same way.
Wasn't the first Jim Crow laws past almost before the ink was dry on the Emancipation Proclamation??
Wilhelmina wrote: "I absolutely loved the description of Pershing when he was at Morehouse, out after the homecoming game with friends, drunk and standing in the middle of the street."He was in Atlanta in the middl..."
That feeling must have helped to sustain them during times of disappointment in the North and West.
Kitty wrote: "Wasn't the first Jim Crow laws past almost before the ink was dry on the Emancipation Proclamation??"Wilkerson talks about this on pp. 40 -41. While there were early Jim Crow laws before and immediately after the Civil War, the system was firmly put into place after Reconstruction, particularly toward the turn of the century. What always fascinates me is how expensive this elaborate system was to maintain. Money that could have been used to rebuild the south was wasted on creating a two-tiered system instead. As the old saying goes, that's a great example of cutting off your nose to spite your face.
I've always been fascinated by the emotional engine that powers racism. I suppose fear is one element, but not the only element. Why does one group of people require that there be an undergroup? Do they think their own freedom would disappear when the undergroup has freedom? Tiny minds. Reminds me in some measure about the fight over where gays have the right to get married. Some people act as if their OWN marriage would be in danger if same sex couples could legally marry. I guess there's a whole mass of people out there who can't think beyond the status quo, that has a failure of imagination. To me it all boils down to a kind of super-selfishness.
It does seem to be based on fear, fear of loss of control of their own lives perhaps. But that would seem to imply a lack of self image or self worth in the one who is racist or anti-gay or whatever, if they are so fearful of being corrupted (or having their families corrupted).That seems to be carried out by some of Wilkerson's research on black migrant's problems in the north. Some of the most virulent haters were immigrants protecting their turf. As for the south, could it be fear that southern whites had due to dependency on blacks and being outnumbered.
I think the Southern economy was based entirely upon the slave work force. They did not have to pay wages, in the owners eyes they fed , clothed and sheltered them , that was enough. Even though the food, clothing and housing was sub-standard they looked on this magnanimous gesture as taking care of their property.
Sherry, I agree and am saddened it always seems one group feels compelled to feel superior to another. As I mentioned earlier, I remember being ostracized because I wasn’t part of the majority religious groups in my corner of the world growing up. I recognize what I had do deal with was minimal in comparison to fearing for one’s life as was the case with those who lived under Jim Crow laws, still it was enough to know a level of frustration due to antagonism from those who thought I was less than they were. Wilkerson has a way of making the history of this era come to life in a way you can not only understand intellectually but also feel in your heart. Two passages in particular really struck me. When explaining the economic impact of the back breaking cotton picking in Ida Mae’s world , she wrote of : …businessmen in Chicago needing oxford shirts, socialites in New York and Philadelphia wanting lace curtains and organdy evening gowns . Closer to home, closer than one dared contemplate, there were Klansmen needing their white cotton robes and hoods. (pg 98)
And I felt this was particularly poignant (on page 191)…the railroad’s cars were packed with the peasant caste of the South, “the huddled masses yearning to breathe free” in their own country …
One of the things I admired the most about this book, is that the author doesn't give the north a pass. In the 60s, they used to talk about de jure and de facto segregation. De jure segregation referred to the laws, i.e. the Jim Crow laws. De facto segregation was more subtle, and often described the kinds of discrimination that African Americans felt when they went to their new cities. For example, when a neighborhood is closed to new populations, as Ida Mae and her husband experienced.
I just finished the book, and handed it over to Leif, who plans on reading it, too. A really excellent book.
Exactly, MAP--like the painful joke that California operated under "James Crow". I'm not finished yet, but it continues to be a profound reading experience.
The saddest thing for me is that this is not exactly past history. Two years ago, when 11-year-old Malia Obama wore a tee shirt with a peace symbol on it, the most vile, malicious, racist, sexist remarks were posted online about her. They've been "removed" but are easily found quoted elsewhere--I only found out about his a couple of months ago.
This country has not grown up yet, and considering the end-timers involved on the conservative side of the coming election (who believe that anyone speaking about mutual understanding, acceptance, and respect for those different from ourselves is preaching the word of the Anti-Christ), it seems it won't happen anytime soon.
This conversation reminds me of the days of busing in Boston schools and some of the hateful visual images that I find are stored away in my memory from TV news during those days. I believe that was the mid-1970s. De-facto segregation has been alive and well in Boston and many northern cities. Things are improving but not there yet.
Robert Pershing Foster reminded me so much of the flamboyant Willie Brown, former Mayor of San Francisco and former Speaker of the CA Assembly. Whatta guy.
Interesting Sara, I had recently became aware of Americans as being infantile in their thinking in regards to race, religion etc. What is our moral duty? We must accept the past, change the present and build a future together as one nation with freedom and justice no matter what ethnicity , politics, sexual proclivity and religion. That is our strength, to accept one and all and provide a safe harbor.
Sometimes I wonder if our country is de-evolving.
During economic upheavals, it seems that forces on the fringes appeal to the basest human instincts. It's happened many times in the past and it's happening now in the intolerance of the far right who are unable to see any worth in anyone else's views. Also, no one will ever convince me that part of what's going on in Congress right now is not racism on some level. This obstructionism seems more than anti-Democrat, it's personal agenda to cause Obama to fail.
I agree, Sue. I totally agree. The very idea that a black man is President of these United States is enraging to way too many people. I guess there is no real way to prove it, other than the feelings I get.
I'm only on page 125 so far, which means I don't have too much to add about the actual text, except to say that I'm loving her way of combining deep research with such a lyrical form of storytelling. I wish I could make this book required reading for all Americans.
A couple of recent news items/editorials have really stood out to me in relation to what I've been reading here.
One is a blog post by a black woman living in New England who sometimes wishes she could live in the South and be surrounded by a black neighborhood:
http://www.npr.org/2011/09/15/1404672...
I'm sure that no one wishes to go back to a time of Jim Crow laws, but at the same time I can understand anyone's feeling of wanting to be surrounded by similar people in a comfortable atmosphere. It all gets so very complicated.
And then another story about a nonprofit group, the African American Farmers of California, caught my eye:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/a...
That's got to be such another complicated endeavor. On the one hand the history of sharecropping has probably made farming seem like an awful idea for many black people, yet why shouldn't people who want to get into farming have some kind of financial support to get started and make it successful? Some of the statistics quoted by the group about the declining numbers of black families with farms probably had something to do with the long migration to more urban northern locations.
I think reading Wilkerson's book is reminding me as I see current news like this of just how many layers are involved, and I wonder how many young people here (of any race) are aware of that history. I'm just really glad that someone has put this very broad history all together into one book.
A couple of recent news items/editorials have really stood out to me in relation to what I've been reading here.
One is a blog post by a black woman living in New England who sometimes wishes she could live in the South and be surrounded by a black neighborhood:
http://www.npr.org/2011/09/15/1404672...
I'm sure that no one wishes to go back to a time of Jim Crow laws, but at the same time I can understand anyone's feeling of wanting to be surrounded by similar people in a comfortable atmosphere. It all gets so very complicated.
And then another story about a nonprofit group, the African American Farmers of California, caught my eye:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/a...
That's got to be such another complicated endeavor. On the one hand the history of sharecropping has probably made farming seem like an awful idea for many black people, yet why shouldn't people who want to get into farming have some kind of financial support to get started and make it successful? Some of the statistics quoted by the group about the declining numbers of black families with farms probably had something to do with the long migration to more urban northern locations.
I think reading Wilkerson's book is reminding me as I see current news like this of just how many layers are involved, and I wonder how many young people here (of any race) are aware of that history. I'm just really glad that someone has put this very broad history all together into one book.
Cara said:I think reading Wilkerson's book is reminding me as I see current news like this of just how many layers are involved, and I wonder how many young people here (of any race) are aware of that history. I'm just really glad that someone has put this very broad history all together into one book. Unfortunately those who need to read it won't, unless they are forced to educate themselves.
Constant Reader
Books mentioned in this topic
The Known World (other topics)All Aunt Hagar's Children: Stories (other topics)
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (other topics)
Native Son (other topics)
Go Tell It on the Mountain (other topics)
More...
Authors mentioned in this topic
Edward P. Jones (other topics)Isabel Wilkerson (other topics)
I learned quite a lot from this book. I hope we will have an insightful discussion.
Here is a short bio from the internet about Ms. Wilkerson.
Isabel Wilkerson, who spent most of her career as a national correspondent and bureau chief at The New York Times, is the first black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in the history of American journalism and was the first black American to win for individual reporting. Inspired by her own parents’ migration, she devoted fifteen years to the research and writing of this book. She interviewed more than 1,200 people, unearthed archival works and gathered the voices of the famous and the unknown to tell the epic story of the relocation of an entire people in The Warmth of Other Suns.
Here is an interview with Ms. Wilkerson click on listen to interview.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/st...
Here are my questions, if you have any thought let me know.
1. What was the migrations impact on the north and how do you think it changed the dynamics of the cities.
2. How did the migration change jobs and communities.?
3. Is it still relevant today?
4. Had you known as much about the Jim Crow Laws before you read the book.
5. Do you think Miss Wilkerson could have added something more or different in the style she presented the book.?
6. In what ways has the African Americas contributed to art , music, literature ,education etc. and do you think their contributions has enriched the whole American culture?
7. What surprised you the most about the book?
I think what surprised me most about the book is the vast expanse of years the migration went on. I had never heard of it.