Isabel Wilkerson: The Warmth of Other Suns

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Partner:: Chautauqua Institution
Location:: Hall of Philosophy
Chautauqua, New York
Event Date:: 08.25.11
Speaker:: Isabel Wilkerson
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Summary: The final week of the Chautauqua season has been spent discussing “The Path to the Civil War.” Yet it was the long path after the war that Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle author Isabel Wilkerson is concerned with in this week’s selection, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. She will speak at the CLSC Roundtable Lecture at 3:30 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy. After the South’s defeat, the period known as Reconstruction saw new laws and regulations put into place that echoed the injustices of slavery. Jim Crow laws segregated and humiliated black southerners, and, along with lynching and intimidation, set many yearning for a new home. “The people in the South felt like the Civil War was going to bring them more opportunities,” said Clara Silverstein said, program director of the Writers’ Center. “They were freed from slavery, but it really didn’t.”Silverstein presented a CLSC Brown Bag review of The Warmth of Other Suns Monday at Alumni Hall. Jim Crow was one of the principal reasons that around six million black southerners left for the North between 1915 to 1970. Called the “Great Migration,” it was “perhaps the biggest underreported story of the 20th century,” Wilkerson wrote, and so it is the focus of The Warmth of Other Suns. Wilkerson, a journalist, was inspired because her own parents had been part of the migration. Her mother came from Georgia and her father, a Tuskegee Airman, from Virginia, and they settled in Washington, D.C. She currently is a professor of journalism and director of narrative nonfiction at Boston University, and she was the first black woman to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 while working as Chicago bureau chief of The New York Times. Her others awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a George Polk Award and Journalist of the Year for 1994 by the National Association of Black Journalists. The Warmth of Other Suns is Wilkerson’s first book, one for which she researched for 15 years and conducted more than 1,200 interviews. She spoke with former black southerners now living in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, and Oakland, Calif., and Wilkerson chose three to illustrate the various experiences of moving North. Though many economists blame the boll weevil for destroying cotton crops and therefore resulting in the Great Migration, Wilkerson argues differently. When conducting all her interviews, what stood out was the conditions of the South — the racism, the discrimination and the hard prospects — that led to “the first mass act of independence by a people who were in bondage in this country for far longer than they have been free,” Wilkerson wrote. Wilkerson wrote about how landowners in the South profited from black sharecroppers, many who were former slaves, by holding them in place through debt. These farmers made no more than a few dollars a year, if anything, after selling their crop, no matter how hard they worked. The landowner, who sold farming supplies on credit and did the accounting, always made sure the year’s labor matched the debt. “It is a great American story that has really been overlooked until she took the time and trouble to interview all these people,” Silverstein said. “I know from growing up in the South what it would have been like if they stayed in the South.” Silverstein grew up in Richmond, Va., and attended high school during desegregation. She even wrote a book about the experience called White Girl: A Story of School Desegregation. Many of the black students she went to school with had parents stuck in low-wage jobs, without many prospects. “Their families had been kept in a certain place for so long, it was very hard for them,” she said. “I see what the opposite story was. Those who stayed in the South didn’t really get the opportunities they deserved.” The Warmth of Other Suns follows Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, each from different regions and time periods and each following different paths. “They had the fullest life stages at every stage of their life, and they also had the recall when they were older,” Silverstein said. “These three seemed to remember amazing details from every stage of their life, and I think that was a real strength of the book.” Each found both success and hardship. Gladney escaped the trap of sharecropping and eventually had the chance to vote, but the neighborhood she settled in became overrun by drug dealers. Starling got a job as a Pullman train porter, from which he could watch the whole Great Migration unfold, yet he was barred from career advancement because he was black. Foster, a doctor, gained the most financial success and even treated Ray Charles, but he still had his personal shortcomings, including a gambling addiction. “I think she did do a good job of not showing all these people perfect. … Some of the problems of the ghetto and some of the problems we hear about of the ’60s, they came to roost,” she said. Reviewing the book, Silverstein said she sees two main arguments in The Warmth of Other Suns. “One of them is that the Great Migration is a hidden story of immigration in this country, that she’s comparing it to some of the stories of those that came from other parts of the world to the U.S.,” Silverstein said. Indeed, with six million making the move, it was even much larger nationwide than the Gold Rush of 1849 or the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s. Yet it went unspoken, because of its great span and because African-American studies did not really take off until later in the 20th century, Silverstein said. The other argument is one against those who say that the Great Migration caused all the problems of northern cities. This influx of black southerners has been blamed for increased welfare recipients, crime and children born out of wedlock. Yet in her research, Wilkerson drew from new census data pointing out that those who moved north were generally more ambitious, better educated and more likely to keep together a family. “What she found was that people who came from the South had really strong family values and worked really hard,” Silverstein said. “I think that’s a hidden strength that she points out.”