A review by miguelb
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson

5.0

This book. Goodness. Certainly, I'd never heard or read a more comprehensive description of the Great Migration, but it's the depth of the research that got to me. Wilkerson needs the reader to understand why millions of Black men, women and children would flee the Jim Crow South, to find solace in places that just weren't that welcoming and sometimes outright hostile. So she conducted over a thousand of interviews and paints a picture of the horrific world of the South, using images so vivid I literally had nightmares. The black kid who was tortured and drowned by adults for sending a white girl in his class a Christmas card? Oh... and they made his father watch? And there was literally no authority to appeal to for justice? Yeah, that's now seared into my brain.

Read this book. It's important. It's beautifully written. It won't be pleasant.