A Book Review by Ron Jones
The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson eloquently explores the Great Migration, an exodus of six million Black Southerners to the Northern & Western United States from roughly 1915 to 1970. It’s the most significant intra-migration in American history. Black people left the lands of their enslaved forefathers in search of lives greater, freer, and more like what America promised them at Reconstruction. The fusion of Black urban & rural shaped American music, politics, & cuisine like no other domestic phenomenon. If the writings of Toni Morrison or James Baldwin captivate you, the athletic feats of Jesse Owens or Serena Williams inspire you, Oprah or Michelle Obama’s podcasts inform & entertain you, a hat tip to the Great Migration is in order. But the Warmth of Other Suns does not explore the Great Migration through the lens of celebrities. Wilkerson dives deep into the lives of three of the millions of nameless faces in search of something more. Ida Mae Gladney, George Starling, and Robert Pershing Foster were born in different states and left Dixie in different decades. They differ in job, educational attainment, and income. Yet the harrowing hand of Jim Crow controlled every aspect of their early lives. The will
to escape suffocating tyranny binds them the six million others wrapped up by the Great Migration, and frankly, humans in general. In the face of unyielding oppression, our innate strength, innovation, and courage lead us to search for better lives. Ida Mae Gladney was born in 1913 in Chickasaw County, MS, across the state from the fertile Delta but still ruled by king cotton. And king cotton maintained a cruel caste system: white planters at the top, Black sharecroppers at the bottom. Ida Mae maintained a gap-toothed smile through the indignities inflicted by the caste, walking to a 1-room school for Black children of all ages, a father who died with no medical care because white doctors refused to treat Black patients, and feet hardened by the Mississippi clay because they couldn’t afford shoes. Ida Mae married in her teens and settled in for life as a sharecropper’s wife on Mr. Edd’s plantation. Sharecropping was slavery by another name. Black laborers worked the fields in exchange for seed, fertilizer, and life’s bare essentials while plantation owners sold the cotton and supposedly split the profits “equally” with the sharecroppers. Mr. Edd was fairer than most plantation owners in that he occasionally gave sharecroppers some earnings at the end of the year. A brutal industry with no oversight and violence for inquiring about a plantation owner’s accounting, some experts estimate >80% of plantation owners cheated sharecroppers. Ida Mae and her extended family also tended to animals & gardens. George, Ida Mae’s husband, decided the family was going to leave in 1937 after his cousin was accused of stealing turkeys that belonged to Mr. Edd, who formed a posse and stalked George’s cousin and beat him within an inch of his life. George and a few other men had to cut off his cousin’s clothes because the blood had stuck them to his body. The turkeys appeared a few days later after a hiatus in the woods. Mr. Edd nor anyone in the posse was ever charged for the brutal assault. George settled up with Mr. Edd and the family took the train north to Milwaukee where George had a sister. Many of the migrants followed relatives to their
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