Warmth of Other Suns: the Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Elizabeth Wilkerson is a 2010 Pulitzer Prize winning reflection on the 100 years of migration during the Jim Crow south into the 1060 civil rights and beyond, where millions of black and and people of color moved across the American landscape.
Wilkerson deftly draws the stories from three main characters: Ida Mae Brown Gladney; Robert Joseph Pershing Foster; and George Swanson Starling, interweaving their storylines throughout time, departure, class and society, and location. Wilkerson also interviewed thousands of others and examined and brought to light pages of documents and histories unseen and unknown to many simply because it is part of a history we were never taught.
Framed by the violence and arbitrary inequality foisted upon black persons, the Warmth of Other Suns is an epic tale of crossing over. Examples that affected me were about Reconstruction, and it's failures and how the south began to re-clench it's lost labor pool into the fist of sharecropping ownership. Understanding how landlords, renters and tenants fought battles to live in neighborhoods, clauses that were written into the deeds of the property to not sale to black people. I see this echoed in the Wells Fargo lending policies that happened in 2018 and now, where loans and predatory lending practices were doled out to African American and Latinx persons of color or minority borrowers.
This book is long and large--I am currently half way through, and intend to finish during Christmas break.
