The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration

Isabel Wilkerson has given all of us a gift by writing this book about our nation’s history and the people who suffered the most. She also wrote Caste. She continues to write about the unspoken caste system in our country, and the narratives that have been foisted on all of us about the Black families that migrated from the south.

She has taken three oral histories from people who found a way to overcome the hatred, the prejudice, the beatings, and the unfair justice, and figured out how to get out and move north. Not an easy feat.

Wilkerson highlights the intellectual and educational realities of the migrants who were dismissed vs. embraced. How that prejuduce kept Black people down yet embraced other immigrants from other countries so that no matter how smart, how well educated, that their jobs were always at the bottom of the totem pole.

As she follows these families, it gives the best insight into the generations that have come afterward, who have struggled with drugs and abuse. I could not put the book down. Every high school student should have to read this book.

This quote, which is in the book, from Daniel Moynihan, sums it up. “That the negro has survived at all is extraordinary – a lesser people might have simply died out, as indeed others have.”