Wilkerson opens Part One of her book by describing the dizzying mix of anxiety and hope that Ida Mae, George, and Robert feel when they begin their perilous journeys out of the South. Yet all three left the South after frightening brushes with the violence of Jim Crow, all three followed friends and family elsewhere in pursuit of a better life elsewhere, and all three struggled to adapt to their destination cities, though they ultimately made these cities their new homes. They followed different routes in different decades: Ida Mae moved up the middle of the country, from Mississippi to Chicago, in the 1930s George traveled up the East Coast, from Florida to New York, in the 1940s and Robert migrated west, from Louisiana to California, in the 1950s. Before migrating, Ida Mae was a plantation sharecropper with little education, Robert was a brilliant surgeon who married into one of Black America’s most elite families, and George was a star student from a small town who became a fruit picker when he couldn’t afford to finish college.

The three protagonists represent both the remarkable diversity within the Great Migration and the common desires, experiences, and sorrows that all of its participants shared. The book looks at the Great Migration by following three of its participants from childhood to the grave: Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster.

In The Warmth of Other Suns, renowned journalist Isabel Wilkerson captures the personal drama and historical significance of the Great Migration, in which more than six million Black Southerners moved to the North and the West between 19.

Part Five: More North and West Than South.

Part Four: The Fullness of the Migration.

Part Three: The Appointed Time of Their Coming.

Part Two: Robert Joseph Pershing Foster.

Part One: The Great Migration, 1915–1970.

The warmth of other suns book review