For her first attempt as an author, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson set out to offer first-hand perspectives of the Great Migration. By the time her work was done, she ended up on a journey of her own.
“I grew up as a child of this migration, and it was only when I started to travel the country as a reporter that I began to realize that my experience was not that different from countless others,” Wilkerson said.
“It dawned on me that I hadn’t seen anything that pulled these stories together. I thought, ‘Who has talked to the people to find out why they had done it?’”
Through The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, she took it upon herself to answer the call, for the sake of her parents – who had come to Washington, D.C. from Virginia and Georgia – and the millions like them.
Wilkerson will be in St. Louis next Wednesday, Feb. 9, to share how embarking on this quest changed her life. As a feeder city for both Mississippi and Arkansas, St. Louisans will most certainly have a special connection to her work.
Her goal was to offer true life character studies of individuals from different stations within the Deep South and encapsulate a movement that spanned nearly seven decades and reached across a nation. Certainly no small matter, but Wilkerson had a vision.
She wanted to illustrate how each had gone in different directions as they chased their piece of the American dream – a dream that had been null and void in their native land.
“It’s humbling when you think about how much they had to endure. They had no options other than to leave,” Wilkerson said. “The experience of my parents and countless others who made the journey was not that different from people coming from another country – except for the fact that they had to leave their homes to become citizens of a country they were born in.”
The routes seemed pre-destined. Mississippi to Chicago, Florida to New York and Louisiana to California were among the most well-worn paths. The title of Wilkerson’s book is borrowed from Richard Wright’s autobiography Black Boy, which captured his migration from Mississippi to Chicago in the 1920s.
Wilkerson wanted to present a representative from each of “the three main streams of the Migration.” She also wanted readers to have a comprehensive experience for the people who took a leap of faith towards freedom and equality.
“If I had known going in what it was going to encompass, I don’t think I would have taken it on,” Wilkerson confessed. “But once I got in it and committed myself to telling these stories, there was no turning back.”
Her efforts spanned 15 years and included more than 2,000 subjects sharing their participation in the movement that changed the landscape of urban America.
She carried on with a sense of urgency, as she knew that the opportunity to speak with the brave souls who left the life they knew for the unseen promises of “Up North” was fleeting. The prime movers of the Great Migration were passing away.
“I had to get to them before it was too late,” Wilkerson said.
‘A misunderstood people’
Over the course of 18 months, Wilkerson whittled the thousands she originally started with down to three: a young wife and mother from Mississippi, a bright man with a thirst for knowledge but limited resources in South Florida, and a young doctor from Monroe, Louisiana who wasn’t permitted to practice medicine because of his skin color.
The end result would be an epic collection of experiences that manage to inspire and enrage through narratives from birth through final season in life.
The book is as captivating as it is unpredictable, offering stories filled with hope that demand an extension of gratitude to those who took steps towards the struggle for equal rights for themselves and on behalf of future generations.
“I felt that this was a misunderstood people,” she said.
“There are plenty of assumptions that these were people who had left to get on welfare and that they had brought crime and poverty. People who migrated had to have this ambition inside of them.”
Brilliantly woven into the individual histories are horrendous facts about the common injustices imposed on African Americans in the South.
“These were people who had been through the worst that your country can hurl at you and came out on the other side,” Wilkerson said. “They were wounded but not beaten – and they didn’t let what they had been through get them down. They carried themselves with a sense of dignity and perseverance.”
They also carried undeniable influence and sprinkled their flavor – from music, arts, literature, food – on all aspects of American life.
“The people of the Great Migration ultimately left us with a legacy of inspiration and the power of the one,” Wilkerson said.
“That one decision changed so much in this country, yet there was no leader and nobody sounded the alarm. The impact stemmed from individual decisions. And the message from their action is that people don’t have to wait for someone to tell them the right thing to do. The answer is within us. And by pressing forward beyond their circumstances and reaching for something better, they have given us the answer.”
On Wednesday, Feb. 9, author Isabel Wilkerson will sign and discuss The Warmth of Other Suns at 7 p.m. at the St. Louis Public Library Schlafly Branch, 225 N. Euclid.
