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Part One: Leaving
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Warmth of Other Suns, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Migration and Freedom
History, Memory, and Identity
The Legacy of the Migration
The Economics of Racism
Love and Family
Decision, Consequence, and Regret
Summary
Analysis
From World War I through the 1970s, Black families in the South face a dilemma: should they stay in place and try to succeed despite segregation, or should they leave in search of better opportunities? In what historians have labeled the Great Migration—and what Wilkerson calls “perhaps the biggest underreported story of the twentieth century”—about six million people choose to leave. Their migration transforms the Southern communities they come from, the cities where they end up, and the entire nation’s social, economic, and political fate.
Wilkerson gives her readers the context they need to understand both the vignettes that she presented in the first chapter and her motives for writing this book. She explains the scale of the Great Migration to counterbalance the personal, individual lens that she uses throughout the rest of the book. And she explains why it’s such an important story to tell by highlighting the contrast between its historical significance and its invisibility in American public life.
Themes
Specifically, migrants choose to trade the South’s Jim Crow caste system for greater freedoms and higher wages elsewhere. But, like the European immigrants who pass through Ellis Island, they also face crowded cities, inflated rents, and unfamiliar customs. The Great Migration can help us understand urban inequalities in American cities today, as well as the rise of the urban language, music, and art that dominates U.S. pop culture today. After all, before the Great Migration, 90 percent of Black Americans live in the South, but by its end, barely half do. Perhaps most importantly, Wilkerson argues, the Great Migration allows Black Americans to assert their independence and take their fate into their own hands.
The contrast between the Great Migration and European immigration through Ellis Island is telling. Both happened around the same time and on the same scale, their participants migrated for similar reasons and faced similar experiences in their destination cities, and both forever shaped U.S. society. But despite all these similarities, Ellis Island is now central to the U.S.’s national identity, whereas the Great Migration has largely been forgotten. As Wilkerson will later explain, this is largely because the U.S.’s system of racial hierarchy made assimilation into the mainstream culture possible for white immigrants, but not for native-born Black citizens. This underlines the importance of Wilkerson’s work: racist assumptions about who truly counts as American continue to shape the nation’s understanding of its own history.
Themes
In rural Rome, Georgia, a young Black girl waves to the people on the train whenever it passes her school. Later, in adulthood, she rides the same train north to Washington, D.C., where she sleeps on a distant cousin’s sofa and gets her photo taken. This woman is Isabel Wilkerson’s mother, and years later, Wilkerson finds this first photo. Wilkerson wonders what her mother was thinking when she left Georgia, what might have happened if she had stayed behind, and how the South would be today if the Great Migration never occurred.
Wilkerson’s personal connections to the Great Migration sparked her initial interest in the subject. Wilkerson feels that she cannot truly understand herself until she understands her parents’ journey, which shows how memory and history are crucial to people’s sense of identity. And Wilkerson also uses her mother’s photo to represent her broader goal in this book: to help her readers empathize with migrants by understanding the difficult circumstances and decisions that they faced.
Themes
The Great Migration produces numerous writers and artists, from Toni Morrison to Tupac Shakur. Its best-known chronicler is Richard Wright, who writes in his autobiography, Black Boy, that he traveled north to feel “the warmth of other suns.” Yet no historian has written a comprehensive study of the Great Migration. This book’s purpose is to help fill this gap.
The Great Migration was the origin of 20th-century Black American culture. Wilkerson’s readers will likely know many of the cultural figures she lists here, but they may not recognize that the Great Migration made their work possible by giving them the resources, education, and freedom necessary to produce great art. Thus, Wilkerson uses this list to help her readers appreciate how influential the Great Migration was and recognize that it has been wrongly forgotten.
Themes
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Wilkerson interviews over 1,200 people during her research, but she chooses to focus on three: Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster. She hopes that their stories will capture “larger emotional truths” about the Great Migration and help correct racist myths about Black culture and poverty. Their experiences are “both universal and distinctly American” because they responded to the uniquely American history of slavery and Jim Crow by turning to the same solution that humans have chosen for centuries: migrating in search of freedom.
Readers may be surprised to hear that Wilkerson conducted such extensive research yet chose to tell just three stories in her book. But this contrast only underlines her point: academic studies and statistics can never capture the “larger emotional truths” of the migration in the way that a few in-depth stories can. Thus, while she incorporates data and historical analysis, she focuses on the stories. She chose Ida Mae, George, and Robert not only because of their stories’ emotional poignancy, but also because they represent a diverse range of migration experiences. They migrate from different places to different places in different decades, and they also belong to different social classes and end up living dramatically different lives after they migrate. At the same time as these three protagonists capture the broad range of migrants and migration experiences, they also all represent the same core principle—migrating for freedom—that Wilkerson sees as both a universal norm and the specific core of American national identity.
Themes
