Warmth Of Other Suns The Epic Story Of Americas Great Migration

In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves.

With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career, the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career, which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he often threw exuberant parties.

Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country trips by car and train and their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos, as well as how they changed these cities with southern food, faith, and culture and improved them with discipline, drive, and hard work. Both a riveting microcosm and a major assessment, The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an unrecognized immigration within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is destined to become a classic.

Veteran reporter Ethan Michaeli tells the story of Chicagoandrsquo;s iconic black newspaper, the family and the journalists who made it great, and the hidden history of black America in the twentieth century.

Giving voice to the voiceless, the Chicago Defender had a reach and influence extending far beyond Chicago. The newspaper and the family behind it condemned Jim Crow, catalyzed the Great Migration, fostered the integration of the U.S. armed forces in the wake of World War II, and laid the groundwork for the civil rights movement. Over the years, the Defenderandrsquo;s staff included an unparalleled collection of writers, intellectuals, and activists: Ida B. Wells, Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Jesse Jackson were among the better-known bylines, but there were hundreds of less celebrated reporters at the paper who braved lynch mobs and policemenandrsquo;s clubs to get their stories.

Through the depth of his research, veteran reporter Ethan Michaeli constructs a revelatory narrative of race in America. The Defender sheds unprecedented light on an entire civic, political, and intellectual universe whose legacy reverberates well into the twenty-first century.

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