Have you ever heard of the Great Migration? I had heard of it before reading this book; I had a dim idea that it had something to do with black people moving to the northern cities during World War Two. It turns out, it’s much bigger than that. Isabel Wilkerson’s book The Warmth of Other Suns opened my eyes to the scale of this migration and how central it is to black history. In 1910, 10% of black people lived outside the South. The black population of Chicago was only 44,103. By 1970 that 10% had risen to 43%, and that 44,103 had topped 1 million. They were moving northward in their masses for over fifty years. It was not just a massive demographic shift. It was, says Wilkerson, “the first step the nation’s servant class ever took without asking.”

This is a big book, but I got through it pretty quickly. The author focuses on three individual migrants from different decades, states and backgrounds. She writes about them so well and they are such interesting people, that I remember their names six months after I read the book: Ida Mae Brandon Gladney who went to Chicago, Robert Pershing Foster who went to California, and George Swanson Starling who fled death threats in Florida and became a train porter in New York. In between, the author zooms out to an overall narrative, placing their travails in context. 

I thought I knew about the racist Jim Crow laws in the Southern US. But I never realised just how dystopian, sick, mad and brutal it was. Black and white people could not tread on the same steps or hold the same rail entering a train. Black motorists had to give right of way to white motorists. Black schools got second-hand textbooks begged from white schools. Ocoee 1920 and Rosewood 1923 were two of many pogroms I’d never heard of before. The lynching of Claude Neal (1934) was another episode which was almost beyond belief. Sheriff McCall is another name you’d do well to google if you’re looking to be horrified. Between 1889 and 1929 someone was lynched on average every few days. 

George Starling attracted my interest because of his role as a labour organiser. In a very informal way, he organised black fruit pickers in Florida to demand better wages. It worked fine until word reached him that the bosses were planning to lynch him. Then he had to high-tail it to the north. Robert Pershing Foster gives an insight into the world of the black bourgeoisie and upper middle class – which always existed, throughout the Jim Crow period and after. But I guess it was Ida Mae’s story that got under my skin the most. We see her as a young wife in Mississippi picking cotton, and we see her as an old woman in the Chicago home she moved into back in the white flight era, observing through her upstairs window the comings and goings of the familiar neighbourhood drug dealers and sex workers.

Generally the black migrants benefited from their migration to the north. Stereotypes about the new black communities in the north – that they had big dysfunctional families, that they didn’t work, that they were uneducated – were all rubbish. 

But often the book’s title reads like bitter irony; the sun wasn’t much brighter in the north. Foster’smigration involved driving for days across the desert being turned away from every motel because of his skin colour – in Arizona, which was not a Jim Crow state. Wilkerson paints a picture of how a ghetto neighbourhood was born. I always assumed ‘white flight’ from the inner city to the suburbs was some slow gradual process. It was not. The first black family would move into the neighbourhood, and at once all the whites would descend into a hysterical frenzy. They would be gone within months or even weeks. 

That is, if they didn’t try to drive out the new black families. There were 58 bombings in 4 years in one Chicago neighbourhood as white concerned residents fought a guerrilla war against peaceful black families. Wilkerson gives an account of the absolutely horrifying events in 1951 in Cicero, a suburb of Chicago, when one black family tried to move in. 

I remember my schoolbooks mentioned that Martin Luther King got a cold reception when he tried to organise black people in the northern cities. I always assumed, in a vague way, that he organised some meetings to which nobody showed up. What actually happened: he organised large marches that were beaten off the streets by violent white mobs. Northern mobs.

What I got out of this book was, first, an acquaintance with Ida Mae, George and Dr Foster, three fascinating individuals. Second, an appreciation of what a massive phenomenon the Great Migration was; think of any famous black person, and chances are they or their parents or grandparents were part of this epic story.

Third, what a crazy dystopia the USA was and is. That country has never really reckoned with this past, not really. For most of my life, the standard way for Americans to deal with the past has been to pretend that Martin Luther King agreed 100% with whatever the hell they happen to believe (Only people in the overlap of the Venn diagram of Protestantism and Socialism can actually claim that honour). This cosy consensus has been fracturing since Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown and George Floyd, and since Trump rose to prominence as a political figure in 2015. I don’t know what the next consensus will be or whether it will be closer to the truth or further away, but it will take a long time to emerge and will be the outcome of an epic political and social struggle. The Warmth of Other Suns deals with a historical episode that ended in the 1970s but it’s impossible to read a book like this without it provoking all kinds of reflections about the present and the future.

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, Random House, 2010

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