Have you read The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson? It came out in 2010 and after several years of meaning to read it, I finally got around to it last year and finally blogging about it now (ok, yes I can be a slow about some things). Despite my delay, I loved the book and it was an important book for me, one that I enjoyed reading and provoked a lot of reflection as an American, as an immigrant, as a racial minority, as an Asian-American.

So here’s a summary of the book without giving too much away: The Warmth of Other Suns is a nonfiction book that intersperses the larger historical narrative of the Great Migration with the biographical stories of three real individuals who lived through the Great Migration (kind of in the style of Common Ground):

• Ida Mae Brandon Gladney who was born in rural Mississippi in 1913, came up North in  and passed away in Chicago in 2004. She worked various jobs in her long life, including as a farmer, factory worker and nurses’ aide.
• George Swanson Sterling who was born in rural Florida in 1918, came up to New York in 1937 and passed away there in 1998. He worked first as a citrus fruit picker in Florida, but most of his working life was as a porter for the passenger rail cars.
• Robert Pershing who was born in Monroe, Louisiana in 1919, came out to California in 1953 and passed away there in 1997. He worked as a general practice surgeon in the US military, private practice, and the Veteran’s medical system for most of his adult life.

You might be asking yourself… umm, what is the Great Migration again? Like most of you probably, I didn’t learn about the Great Migration in any of my US history classes. It describes the migration of six million black southerners from the South to the North and West between WWI and 1970 (to put that into perspective, according to Wikipedia there were only 15mn black Americans in 1950). They were pushed out of the South by racism, violence, oppressive poverty, and lack of opportunities – many of the same reasons other immigrant groups choose to make a big move.

The book is extremely well-written – not just in its mechanics but it’s eloquent, passionate and deeply empathetic. But apart from this, I personally appreciated it for two reasons:

First, it made an important contribution to my understanding of black history (and my suspicion is that this will be true of most Americans as well). I think that black history is pretty under- and mis-represented in the US and it directly impacts how non-black Americans perceive black Americans. Yes, most American kids learn about slavery and about Martin Luther King. But my fear is that those figures and events seem too distant to non-black American and not real enough. A sample of the facts that Wilkerson mentions that I found extremely sobering:

• Between 1889 to 1929 a black American was lynched or burned alive every four days across the South
• In 1950, Florida’s special investigator said there had been so many mob executions in one county that it ‘never had a negro live long enough to go to trial’ (p.62)
• Even though Brown vs Board of Education happened in 1953, it took well into the 1970s and 1980s for many school districts to desegregate and in the case of one school district in Mississippi, it apparently never did
• Largely driven by discriminatory landlords, real estate sellers and explicitly racist housing policy from the federal government that lasted until almost 1970, often black migrants to the North paid up 100% more in rent for housing that was significantly inferior (p. 270).

Unfortunately, the police shootings of unarmed black men over the last several years has made even more stark the fact that significant, systematic and often violent racism isn’t just history, that it is still very much something America is still struggling with.

Second, the book helped me reflect on what I had in common with these three folks who on the surface of it, are so different than me. They were immigrants and shared a lot of the joys, trials and hang-ups common to this experience. They were motivated to leave because of a terrible situation or to realize a vision of themselves that they couldn’t where they were or a bit of both. They left what they had known to start over somewhere completely different. They had a complicated relationship with where they came from – both a deep lasting affection but also a fair share of negative feelings. They felt they had to prove themselves to the families they left behind. Their children were different from themselves because they grew up in this new world and at times it felt an important chain of connection and continuity was broken. These are part of my immigrant experience and that of my family, as well as nearly every immigrant that ever came to America, regardless of where they came from.

I wish that this book was available in Korean so that my parents and their friends could read it too. I think they would recognize themselves in the three people featured.