The Warmth of Other Suns.

Isabel Wilkerson says she spent 15 years researching the book The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction in 2010, and the research shows in the incredible depth of detail in this tripartite narrative about the mass movement of black Americans from the Jim Crow South to the north and west from 1915 to 1970. Wilkerson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for journalism while working for the New York Times, interviewed over 1200 people, and focused this sweeping saga on three African-Americans who fled the south’s limited opportunities and overt, violent racism, fleeing Mississippi, Florida, and Louisiana for Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. Their stories are interwoven with each other’s and with other related histories of others who followed similar paths, and the tragedies of some of those who chose to stay behind.

Wilkerson gives us three characters who will accompany us through the book’s 600-odd pages (for me, 22-plus hours of audio): Ida Mae Gladney, a sharecropper’s wife from Mississippi who followed her husband, George, to Milwaukee and eventually the south side of Chicago; George Starling, a fruit picker from Eustis, Florida, who tried to organize other fruit pickers to earn better wages but fled from white landowners who set out to lynch him; and Robert Pershing Foster, a doctor from Louisiana who became a successful surgeon in Los Angeles and served many celebrity patients. The three all marry and raise children, and all find greater prosperity in the north than would ever have been possible where they were born, but all face the normal travails of any working-class life, and each carries some of the baggage of their birth and upbringing as outcasts in a racist country well into adulthood.

All three have compelling, often heartbreaking individual stories – although I think Wilkerson’s touch here is so deft that she could make anyone’s life story compelling – but none was more fascinating than the path taken by Dr. Foster, who left Monroe, Louisiana, and found success as a doctor in California both by outworking other doctors and by bringing an intense, precise sort of personal attention to his patients. Shedding his childhood name of Pershing after he moved to go by the more conventional name of Robert, Dr. Foster seems to have achieved the American dream against long odds, earning material wealth, marrying well, raising three daughters who themselves became successful, thus creating an ongoing chain of success and upward mobility from his own struggle. Yet he never seems to be able to escape the scars of a childhood (and possibly a marriage that brought him in-laws who never thought he was good enough) in a way that allows him to enjoy his success. Wilkerson illustrates him as a demanding, controlling husband who was meticulous about his own appearance and that of his wife, while he also was a compulsive gambler who clearly enjoyed how his spending at casinos bought him a form of respect at the casinos he frequented. Later in the book, Wilkerson tells of a gala Foster threw in his own honor, and how he agonized over every detail of the party, and how he couldn´t enjoy it during or afterwards because of perceived imperfections in the result.

At times a brutal, unsparing look at the treatment southern whites doled out to the black underclass as a matter of course, The Warmth of Other Suns is also deeply personal and empathetic. Wilkerson tells several stories of lynchings, including Leander Shaw and Claude Neal, the latter of whom was brutally tortured before he was hanged for a murder he may not have committed. She details the violent, racist reign of Lake County, Florida, Sheriff Willis McCall, accused at least 50 times of abusing or killing black suspects in his custody, once shooting two handcuffed black prisoners in cold blood and finally ousted from office after eight terms when he kicked a black prisoner to death. (McCall’s son, now 64, was arrested in January for molesting a young girl and possessing child pornography. He had stated in the past that his father was innocent of all charges of civil rights violations.) George Starling leaves Florida because a friend tells him local whites are going to take him to a swamp for a ´necktie party,´ racist slang for lynching. Ida Mae and her husband, also George, leave their life as sharecroppers under a benevolent but still manipulative, controlling landowner after a friend of theirs is beaten into senselessness over the theft of some turkeys that, it turns out, had just wandered off. Robert Foster isn’t driven out the same way but realizes that as a black doctor who can’t even receive admitting privileges at the white hospital, he’ll end up as just a ‘country doctor’ if he doesn’t move out of the land of Jim Crow.

The stories of violence and outright suppression are hard enough to fathom today, but the smaller indignities that the three protagonists and other African-American characters in the book faced fill in the gap and have even more impact because they’re easier to ingest today, when lynchings like that of James Byrd Jr. are extremely rare and result in actual convictions of the killers. When Dr. Foster is driving to California and can’t find a hotel room, even though some white proprietors are kind in rejecting him, lying to his face about vacancies, you can see and feel it. When Ida Mae has to take a series of temporary jobs in Chicago, where most employers will still choose only white candidates, she ends up in a situation right out of #MeToo. Even positive stories often come with a bitter reminder of what came before; George Starling, working as a porter on a north-south rail line, is told to direct black passengers to certain cars when the train passes into the south even after Jim Crow has been made illegal, and has to subtly inform these passengers of their right to say no, at risk of his own employment.

Wilkerson’s personal approach to the book does not exclude the academic research on the subject, but she instead sprinkles details and observations of experts on the timing, motive, and extent of the migration – which came in waves, and finally slowed after the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964 and slowly implemented over the following decade. (And, of course, we now see one party trying to roll it back, along with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.) This is a work of scholarship, yet also a labor of love, as no author could spend so much time and become so invested in a subject unless it were of abiding personal interest to her in the first place. It’s also a potent reminder of why African-Americans today remain at an economic disadvantage relative to whites, and how we are simply repeating the sins of our fathers when we deny black Americans their right to vote, or incarcerate them on nonviolent drug charges, or underfund urban schools as if they were the ‘colored’ schools of the Jim Crow era.

Next up: Margaret Creighton’s The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City: Spectacle and Assassination at the 1901 Worlds Fair.