14 “Since 1924”: “4,733 Mob Action Victims Since ’82, Tuskegee Reports,” Montgomery Advertiser, April 26, 1959.
15 The mechanical cotton picker: Donald Holley, The Second Great Emancipation: The Mechanical Cotton Picker, Black Migration, and How They Shaped the Modern South (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas, 2000), pp. 38–40.
16 Still, many planters: Ibid., p. 101.
17 “Much of this labor”: Harris P. Smith, “Late Developments in Mechanical Cotton Harvesting,” Agricultural Engineering, July 1946, p. 321. Smith, the chief of the division of agricultural engineering at the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station, presented this paper at a meeting of the American Society of Agricultural Engineers at Fort Worth, Texas, in April 1946. See also Gilbert C. Fite, “Recent Changes in the Mechanization of Cotton Production in the United States,” Agricultural History 24 (January 1950): 28, and Oscar Johnston, “Will the Machine Ruin the South?” Saturday Evening Post 219 (May 31, 1947): 37.
18 “If all of their dream”: “Our Part in the Exodus,” Chicago Defender, March 17, 1917, p. 9.
19 Toni Morrison: Toni Morrison’s parents migrated from Alabama to Lorraine, Ohio. Diana Ross’s mother migrated from Bessemer, Alabama, to Detroit, her father from Bluefield, West Virginia. Aretha Franklin’s father migrated from Mississippi to Detroit. Jesse Owens’s parents migrated from Oakville, Alabama, to Cleveland when he was nine. Joe Louis’s mother migrated with him from Lafayette, Alabama, to Detroit. Jackie Robinson’s family migrated from Cairo, Georgia, to Pasadena, California. Bill Cosby’s father migrated from Schuyler, Virginia, to Philadelphia, where Cosby was born. Nat King Cole, as a young boy, migrated with his family from Montgomery, Alabama, to Chicago. Condoleezza Rice’s family migrated from Birmingham, Alabama, to Denver, Colorado, when she was twelve. Thelonious Monk’s parents brought him from Rocky Mount, North Carolina, to Harlem when he was five. Berry Gordy’s parents migrated from rural Georgia to Detroit, where Gordy was born. Oprah Winfrey’s mother migrated from Kosciusko, Mississippi, to Milwaukee, where Winfrey went to live as a young girl. Mae Jemison’s parents migrated from Decatur, Alabama, to Chicago when she was three years old. Romare Bearden’s parents carried him from Charlotte, North Carolina, to New York City. Jimi Hendrix’s maternal grandparents migrated from Virginia to Seattle. Michael Jackson’s mother was taken as a toddler from Barbour County, Alabama, by her parents to East Chicago, Indiana; his father migrated as a young man from Fountain Hill, Arkansas, to Chicago, just west of Gary, Indiana, where all the Jackson children were born. Prince’s father migrated from Louisiana to Minneapolis. Sean “P. Diddy” Combs’s grandmother migrated from Hollyhill, South Carolina, to Harlem. Whitney Houston’s grandparents migrated from Georgia to Newark, New Jersey. The family of Mary J. Blige migrated from Savannah, Georgia, to Yonkers, New York. Queen Latifah’s grandfather migrated from Birmingham, Alabama, to Newark. Spike Lee’s family migrated from Atlanta to Brooklyn. August Wilson’s mother migrated from North Carolina to Pittsburgh, following her own mother, who, as the playwright told it, had walked most of the way.
20 “almost exactly at the norm”: Otto Klineberg, Negro Intelligence and Selective Migration (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935), pp. 43–45. The IQ tests were of ten-year-old girls in Harlem, divided on the basis of how long they had lived in New York. Those in New York for less than a year scored 81.8, those in New York one to two years scored 85.8, those in New York for three to four years scored 94.1, and those born in New York scored 98.5. Other studies—of boys or with the use of other measurements—found what Klineberg described as an “unmistakable trend” of improved intellectual performance the longer the children were in the North.
21 Klineberg’s studies: “Otto Klineberg, Who Helped Win ’54 Desegregation Case, Dies at 92,” The New York Times, March 10, 1992.
22 Jean Baptiste Point DuSable: Bessie Louise Pierce, A History of Chicago, vol. 1 (New York: Knopf, 1937), pp. 12, 13. Pierce describes Point DuSable as having been the son of a man from “one of France’s foremost families” and says “that his mother was a Negro slave.” Christopher R. Reed, “In the Shadow of Fort Dearborn: Honoring DuSable at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933–1934,” Journal of Black Studies 21, no. 4 (June 1991): 412.
23 Jan Rodrigues: Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 12–13.
24 “In the simple process”: Lawrence R. Rodgers, Canaan Bound: The African American Great Migration Novel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), p. 186.
NOTES ON METHODOLOGY
1 It is important: Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922), pp. xxiii, xxiv.
PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
BEACON PRESS: Excerpts from Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin, copyright © 1955 and copyright © renewed 1983 by James Baldwin. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press, Boston.
DUTTON SIGNET, A DIVISION OF PENGUIN GROUP (USA) INC.: Excerpt from Act 1, Scene i, from The Piano Lesson by August Wilson, copyright © 1988, 1990 by August Wilson. Reprinted by permission of Dutton Signet, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
JOHN HAWKINS & ASSOCIATES, INC., AND THE ESTATE OF RICHARD WRIGHT: Excerpts from 12 Million Black Voices by Richard Wright, copyright © 1940 by Richard Wright. Reprinted by permission of John Hawkins & Associates, Inc., and the Estate of Richard Wright.
HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS: Excerpt from Dust Tracks on a Road by Zora Neale Hurston, copyright © 1942 by Zora Neale Hurston, copyright renewed 1970 by John C. Hurston. Excerpts from Black Boy by Richard Wright, copyright © 1937, 1942, 1944, 1945 by Richard Wright, copyright renewed 1973 by Ellen Wright. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
ALFRED A. KNOPF, A DIVISION OF RANDOM HOUSE, INC., AND HAROLD OBER ASSOCIATES INCORPORATED: Excerpt from “For Russell and Rowena Jelliffe,” excerpt from “One-Way Ticket,” and an excerpt from “The South” from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, copyright © 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Additional rights by permission of Harold Ober Associates Incorporated.
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RAY CHARLES MARKETING GROUP: Excerpt from “Hide Nor Hair” by Percy Mayfield and Morton Craft, copyright © Tangerine Music Corporation. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Under license from the Ray Charles Marketing Group on behalf of Tangerine Music Corporation.
UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS: Excerpt from Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, copyright © 1996 by the University of North Carolina Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, www.uncpress.unc.edu.
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Reading Group Guide
About This Guide
The introduction, discussion questions, and suggested further reading that follow are designed to enhance your group’s discussion of The Warmth of Other Suns, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson’s magisterial history of America’s Great Migration. A New York Times Book Review Best Book of the Year and National Book Critics Circle Award Winner.
Questions for discussion
1. The Warmth of Other Suns combines a sweeping historical perspective with vivid intimate portraits of three individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, Ge
orge Swanson Starling, and Robert Pershing Foster. What is the value of this dual focus, of shifting between the panoramic and the close-up? In what ways are Ida Mae Gladney, George Starling, and Robert Foster representative of the millions of other migrants who journeyed from South to North?
2. In many ways The Warmth of Other Suns seeks to tell a new story—about the Great Migration of southern blacks to the north—and to set the record straight about the true significance of that migration. What are the most surprising revelations in the book? What misconceptions does Wilkerson dispel?
3. What were the major economic, social, and historical forces that sparked the Great Migration? Why did blacks leave in such great numbers from 1915 to 1970?
4. What were the most horrifying conditions of Jim Crow South? What instances of racial terrorism stand out most strongly in the book? What daily injustices and humiliations did blacks have to face there?
5. In what ways was the Great Migration of southern blacks similar to other historical migrations? In what important ways was it unique?
6. After being viciously attacked by a mob in Cicero, a suburb of Chicago, Martin Luther King, Jr. said: “I have seen many demonstrations in the South, but I have never seen anything so hostile and so hateful as I’ve seen here today” (this page). Why were northern working-class whites so hostile to black migrants?
7. Wilkerson quotes Black Boy in which Richard Wright wrote, on arriving in the North: “I had fled one insecurity and embraced another” (this page). What unique challenges did black migrants face in the North? How did these challenges affect the lives of Ida Mae Gladney, George Starling, and Robert Foster?
8. Wilkerson points out that the three most influential figures in jazz were all children of the Great Migration: Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and John Coltrane. What would American culture look like today if the Great Migration hadn’t happened?
9. What motivated Ida Mae Gladney, George Starling, and Robert Foster to leave the South? What circumstances and inner drives prompted them to undertake such a difficult and dangerous journey? What would likely have been their fates if they had remained in the South? In what ways did living in the North free them?
10. Near the end of the book, Wilkerson asks: “With all that grew out of the mass movement of people, did the Great Migration achieve the aim of those who willed it? Were the people who left the South—and their families—better off for having done so? Was the loss of what they left behind worth what confronted them in the anonymous cities they fled to?” (this page). How does Wilkerson answer these questions?
11. How did the Great Migration change not only the North but also the South? How did the South respond to the mass exodus of cheap black labor?
12. In what ways are current attitudes toward Mexican Americans similar to attitudes toward African Americans expressed by Northerners in The Warmth of Other Suns? For example, the ways working-class Northerners felt that Southern blacks were stealing their jobs.
13. At a neighborhood watch meeting in Chicago’s South Shore, Ida Mae listens to a young state senator named Barack Obama. In what ways is Obama’s presidency a indirect result of the Great Migration?
14. What is the value of Wilkerson basing her research primarily on firsthand, eyewitness accounts, gathered through extensive interviews, of this historical period?
15. Wilkerson writes of her three subjects that “Ida Mae Gladney had the humblest trappings but was perhaps the richest of them all. She had lived the hardest life, been given the least education, seen the worst the South could hurl at her people, and did not let it break her.… Her success was spiritual, perhaps the hardest of all to achieve. And because of that, she was the happiest and lived the longest of them all” (this page). What attributes allowed Ida Mae Gladney to achieve this happiness and longevity? In what sense might her life, and the lives of George Starling and Robert Foster as well, serve as models for how to persevere and overcome tremendous difficulties?
Suggested Reading
Eric Arnesen, Black Protest and the Great Migration: A Brief History with Documents; Richard Wright, Black Boy, Native Son, 12 Million Black Voices; James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son; Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man; James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration; Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America; Toni Morrison, Jazz.
Visit the website for more, including photographs, www.thewarmthofothersuns.com
Isabel Wilkerson Page 70