| The Warmth of Other Suns | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) | Isabel Wilkerson |
| Publisher | Random House |
| Publication date | 2010 |
| Pages | 622 |
| ISBN | ISBN 9780679444329 |
| OCLC Number | 741763572 |
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (2010) is a historical study by African-American author Isabel Wilkerson.[1][2] It is about the The Great Migration and the Second Great Migration, the movement of blacks out of the Southern United States to the Midwest, Northeast and West between 1915 and 1970.[1][2] The book intertwines a general history and statistical analysis of the entire period, and the biographies of three persons: a sharecropper's wife who left Mississippi in the 1930's for Chicago, named Ida Mae Brandon Gladney; an agricultural worker, George Swanson Starling, who left Florida for New York City in the 1940s; and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, a doctor who left Louisiana in the the early 1950s, for Los Angeles.
Contents |
The main title of the book is taken from a poem by author Richard Wright, who himself moved from the south to Chicago, in the 1920s. [3] Parts of that poem are excerpted here:
. . .I was taking a part of the South
To transplant in alien soil...
Respond to the warmth of other suns
And, perhaps, to bloom.
-- published in Black Boy, 1945 (emphasis added)
The book won the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award (Nonfiction).
Other honors include: