By Martin Kilson

Isabel Wilkerson’s, The Warmth of Other Suns, adds another important book to the great tradition of serious writing on the interaction between American society’s white supremacist practices, on the one hand, and, on the other, the migration of black American citizens out of the viciously racist South to the North and West.

A Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter at the New York Times and journalism professor at Boston University, Wilkerson subtitles her book “The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration,” – thereby immediately making clear her goal of presenting a monumental-scale, popular history of an extraordinary historical development.

Certainly, The Warmth of Other Suns is not a regular scholarly examination of the forces that compelled some six million black Americans to escape from the South during the first five decades of the twentieth century. Although she builds on the foundations of work done by scholars from Carter G. Woodson and W.E.B. Du Bois to, more recently, Joe W. Trotter, Kenneth Kusmer and Dennis Dickerson, Wilkerson tells her tale through what I call “historical intimacy.” She describes African-Americans’ Great Migration through the lives of three individuals, Ida Mae Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, and their families.

Gladney’s and Starling’s families, with their agrarian working-class backgrounds as cotton and orange-grove pickers, superficially fit the commonplace perception of the migrants as poor and with little formal education, driven to leave the South by bleak economic prospects and unyielding racist oppression. Foster’s solidly middle-class background, however, was unusual among black Americans anywhere during that era. Both his parents were graduates of Leland College, a small Negro college in Alabama, and both were educators, with Foster’s father attaining the rank of school principal.

As Wilkerson tells it, Foster’s migration story also differs significantly not only from Gladney’s and Starling’s, but also from many black bourgeoisie migrants. Individually and through local and national black civic associations—from churches to civil rights groups, and so on—many of these blacks involved themselves outreach-to-black-masses activities. In various ways they helped their less-educated and less-sophisticated brethren adjust to the often-wrenching change movement from South to North entailed.

Foster did not to any appreciable degree. Rather, his was a single-minded quest to become a financially successful medical doctor and surgeon—and secure the high social status that would bring. He graduated from Atlanta’s renowned men’s Morehouse College, one of the top-ranked Negro colleges, and courted and married a Spelman College woman,, Alice Clement. She just happened to be the daughter of Dr. Rufus Clement, president of Atlanta University, a cornerstone of the black professional class in Atlanta and beyond.

Foster endured a traumatic encounter with American racism as a U.S. Army doctor during the Korean War, when his application for the post of chief surgeon was scuttled because he was black. But the effect apparently was to confirm for him his choice of an intense focus on his own family, not racial activism. After the war, he moved his wife and two daughters to Los Angeles, where, through that city’s network of African-American physicians, he established a successful medical practice and high-rank social connections.

“He became obsessed withappearances,” Wilkerson writes, “and spent a fortune on [his daughters’] clothes and breeding so that there would be no reason for them to be rejected [by White America] as he had been.” Visiting him in the last years of his life, she quotes him as saying, “I didn’t want them to suffer the pains of racism. I didn’t want them to have to sit in the back of the bus…. I didn’t want them to be open to being molested.”

Wilkerson deftly broadens the meaning of Foster’s migration story for blacks in general. “Unlike other parents raised in the South,” she writes, “he had never drilled into his children the hardships he had endured or dwelled on the limits of what they could or could not do based on the color of their skin. It was a strategy that worked beautifully in producing young women of grace and refinement, but left them knowing little about the rituals and folk wisdom and history of the South….”

But it would be a mistake to think Wilkerson condemns Dr. Foster’s choice. In the book’s epilogue she ends his story with a comment that recognizes the complexity of the ways individual African Americans responded to the inescapable, infuriating racism directed against them. She writes that Foster “found financial success and walked taller in a land more suited for him.”

Wilkerson presents the Foster migration saga in eighteen separate sections – as she does for the stories of Ida Mae Gladney and George Swanson Starling. This approach initially produces a somewhat confusing storytelling trajectory; but Wilkerson’s intellectually-shrewd and technically-astute capabilities enable her to craft an overall narrative that retains its coherence over the book’s 600-plus pages

Her over-arching theme for Warmth is most powerfully expressed by Langston Hughes’ elliptical and poignant poem, The South, from which she takes the title of her book’s fourth section “The Kinder Mistress.”

The lazy, laughing South/ With blood on its mouth…. /Passionate, cruel,/ Honey-dipped, syphilitic– That is the South./ And I, who am black, would love her/ But she spits in my face…/ So now I seek the North—/ The cold-faced North,/ For she, they say/ is a kinder mistress.

It’s in her telling the migration story of George Swanson Starling that Wilkerson’s at her journalistic and narrative best, intertwining the systemic oppression and violence blacks endured as a group with the horrific tales of Starling’s grandparents’ and parents’ plight as oppressed sharecroppers in Alabama and oppressed fruit pickers in the Citrus Belt of central Florida.

“These [were] some of Lil George’s [Starling's nickname] earliest memories,” Wilkerson tells her readers. “Each year, he saw his grandfather return from the planter’s house after another dispiriting settlement and recount to the family what had transpired. At the end of every harvest, the planter would call John Starling [Starling's grandfather] up to the big house. John would knock on the back door, the only door colored people were permitted to enter, according to southern protocol. He and the planter met in the planter’s kitchen. ‘Come on in John,’ the planter said. ‘Come here, boy. Come here. Have a seat. Sit down here.’ The planter pulled out his books. ‘Well John,’ the planter began. ‘Boy, we had a good year, John.’ Yes, sir, Mr. Reshard’ [the planter's name]. I’m sure glad to hear that.’ ‘We broke even [said Reshard]. You don’t owe me nothing. And I don’t owe you nothing.’

In other words, the grandfather had nothing to show for a year’s hard toiling in the field. ‘This is all he ends up, ‘We broke even’,” George would say years later. ‘He has no money, no nothing for his family. And now he’s ready to start a new year in the master’s debt. He’ll start all over again. Next year, they went through the same thing–’We broke even’.” (Emphasis Added)

This kind of cruel, amoral, power-manic oppression blacks endured not only in every line of work where they had to depend on whites, but also in Southern society at large is what, in Langston Hughes’ poetic voice, fueled Black folks’ desire to escape “the laughing South with blood on its mouth. It’s what, in Richard Wright’s poetic language, sparked Black folks’ desire for “the warmth of other suns”.

Isabel Wilkerson’s packaging and capturing the intimate nooks-and-crannies level of black lives, albeit via a somewhat idiosyncratic narrative organization, represents a unique popular-history achievement. It is a contribution to American history that, I think, is superior to similar popular-history books on immigrant white ethnic groups’ transformation into mainstream American—groups like Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Jewish-Americans, and so on. The Warmth of other Suns has been in print for a couple of months, and as of October 17, it has spent four weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, no doubt a much deserved recognition.

Martin Kilson is professor of government emeritus at Harvard University and the author of numerous books on African and African-American history and politics. His new book, The Making of Black Intellectuals: Studies on the African-American Intelligentsia, will be published by the University of Missouri Press