Photograph by Joe Henson
Epic, masterful, magisterial—these are the descriptors that have been applied to Isabel Wilkerson's new book, The Warmth of Other Suns. Wilkerson, a former national correspondent and bureau chief for the New York Times (where she was the first black American to win a Pulitzer Prize for individual reporting), spent nearly 15 years on the manuscript, interviewing more than 1200 people and reading a book a day. If that sounds ambitious—and it is—there may not have been any other way to approach the story of the Great Migration. It is a big, big, big story.
Between 1915 and 1970, 6 million African-Americans left the South for the North. To give you an idea of how profound this population shift was, consider that at the beginning of the migration, 90 percent of all African-Americans lived in the South; by the end, it was fewer than 50 percent This migration, which Wilkerson calls "the greatest underreported story of the 20th century," affected American culture at every level, and we are still feeling its impacts today. Though there are many books on the Great Migration, Wilkerson's book evokes the dreadful atmosphere of day-to-day life in the Jim Crow South so vividly that the reader feels it on a gut level; you understand perfectly why people felt compelled to leave. Wilkerson does this by telling the stories of three people: Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, who left Mississippi for Chicago in the late 30s; George Swanson Starling, who moved to New York from Florida in 1945; and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, a Louisiana surgeon who made a harrowing drive across Texas in the early 50s to make a new life for himself in California. Because Wilkerson writes their lives like a novelist would, this 622-page book feels much shorter than it actually is.
We spoke with Wilkerson last week in anticipation of her appearance tomorrow, February 9, at 7 p.m. at the Schlafly Library (225 N. Euclid, 314-367-4120 or go to slpl.org), where she will read from and sign The Warmth of Other Suns.
St. Louis Magazine: You’re probably sick to death of talking about this, but I was so awed by your research process…talking to 1200 people is not something most people would do.
Isabel Wilkerson: Well, it’s not all that unusual for me, because at the New York Times I did long-form journalism, in which I might have worked on a piece for a month or so, and in order to do that, I would have to conduct many, many interviews to narrow it down to one person. So this is my methodology, and this is what I do for any story that I might be working on. In fact, I stopped counting at 1200 only because that was over the course of a year and a half. In many respects, it’s a conservative number, because I would go to senior centers in Los Angeles, in Chicago, in Oakland, in New York, Milwaukee. And in each of these places, I might have in one day hit three or four or five senior centers, and each one of them I could on one day interview 70 or 80 or 100 people in that amount of time. So it was more natural to my own process than it may appear on the face of it.
SLM: There’s a quote from you that I’ve seen repeated a lot, which is that the Great Migration was the most underreported story of the 20th century. You’d touched on this in other interviews, how so many people your age and younger were not aware of the Great Migration and how it has shaped their own lives, even though there have been other books about it. But your book seems like it’s shaping up to be sort of the definitive book on the subject now.
IW: Well, what I wanted to do with the book was to bring to life the motivations, experiences and the journeys of the people who participated in this, and that was a big missing piece. Much of the discussion about the Great Migration, really, since it began, had been on what happened once they got there, not on what it took for them to get there. And I wanted to understand what that was, because it was part of my own experience. My parents migrated from the South to the North, my mother from Georgia, my father from Southern Virginia, to Washington D.C. A lot of the people did not talk about what they had gone through….when they left, they left for good, they didn’t look back, and they often didn’t share with children and grandchildren the heartache and losses and the pain they experienced during the time they had to live in this caste system that they had been born into. This is an opportunity to hear their voices, and to recreate what their lives had been like, and what led them to this decision. One of the reasons I had a great deal of urgency about doing the reporting, tying in with what we had started out with, with the many interviews that I ended up having to do, was these people were getting up in years. There was not a whole lot of time to get to them. I wanted to get to the story before it was too late. I knew that the archives would always be there—all the journals and anthropological studies that might have been done, the sociological works that had been written—but the people wouldn’t.
SLM: You mentioned people not wanting to talk about the pain of their experiences in the South. But you also talk about, in other interviews and in the book, how people held on to Southern traditions, and how they absolutely kept these strong ties back to the South, through family.
IW: They did not talk about their actual experiences necessarily, or the reasons or the motivations or what they’d endured. But what they did carry with them were the traditions and the values and the culture—the food, the music, the language—they brought that with them. Though some people actually shed that as well, changed their names, and became totally Northern, as they perceived that to mean. But my sense of it, most people carried the South with them when they left. The majority of African-Americans in the North, the Midwest and the West to this day are descended from people from this Great Migration. And they retain are the rituals and the folkways that have passed on through the generations, that were carried with these people from the South as they journeyed to the North and the West. What often was not said were the reasons why they ended up where they were, the decision to come to come to this particular place. What had they experienced in the South that led them to make this decision, and how they made a way for themselves once they arrived. Those are the kinds of things that might not have been spoken explicitly by the people, and that’s what I wanted to hear.
SLM: When you say caste system—I mean, just these stories about people getting blocked at the train station as they are trying to leave—I’m sure a lot of younger people who have read the book just had no idea just how incredibly oppressive this caste system was. So I think this book has blown a lot of people’s minds.
IW: It has. It really has. But you know, it’s easy for us to say after the fact, if we haven’t lived through it, why not talk about it? One of the points that was so important to me as I went about working on this book was that the decisions they made were distinctly human and personal. They did what so many other groups have done when life became untenable. In that respect, they are not unlike any other group that has crossed the Atlantic, or the Rio Grande or the Pacific Ocean. The tragedy of it is that they had to do it within the borders of their own country. And that’s what makes it an especially painful thing for people to talk about. In some ways the beauty of all that has occurred since the migration, or as a result of the migration, is that that the world has changed so much, that it’s almost incomprehensible to us today, that they had to go through what they went through, and not that long ago. We’re talking the 20th century; we’re talking well into the 20th century when you get to the late ’60s and early ’70s, which is when this migration ended. This is within the lifespan of many, many, many people in the United States today. The focus of the research was to find out as much as I could about what it was like to live in that era, and to be these people, so that I could make it come to life for the reader, so that perhaps we could understand what they went through and why they made the decisions they did. Ultimately, one of the questions that I think the book asks is 'What would you have done, had you been in the same situation?' All Americans can ask the same question if they think back to their own background, and think to themselves, what would they have done had they been a great-grandmother from Ireland, or a grandfather from Russia, wherever their forebears might have come from.
SLM: But even if they went back, I’m sure it would be incomprehensible to them to move back. And yet, there is this young generation who is doing exactly that.
IW: Well, that’s one of the greatest legacies of this Great Migration. The fact that the South changed, and it was the actions of these people that helped to move it forward...before the Great Migration occurred, 90 percent of all African-Americans were living in the South. That means that there was an oversupply of cheap labor, all stuck in one region of the country. That meant that it devalued their work, and it devalued their lives as well…by the end of this Great Migration, nearly half of all African-Americans were living outside the South, from Washington D.C. to New York over to Chicago and Detroit, to the entire West Coast. So they were all over the country, and that meant that it spread out this group of people whose work had been devalued. That put a lot of pressure on the South. The South went to a great deal of trouble to keep the people from leaving. They would arrest them on the railroad platform, they would arrest them from their seats on the train, they would wave the train on through when there were too many people to arrest. The record is clear, the editorials show a sense of panic and alarm over what to do, and their actions show they wanted to figure out a way to keep this cheap labor from leaving…the migration could only begin, even though there was the Emancipation Proclamation and the people had been free for 60 years on the face of it, after the Civil War was over, they did not leave until they had a real opportunity, and that was when, in World War I, immigration was cut off from Europe. And the North had a problem—it needed cheap labor, and it went to find the cheapest labor in the land, which was African-Americans in the South. They began to recruit heavily, and that is how the migration actually began. At a certain point, the South began to create these enormous fees for anyone who wanted to recruit labor, meaning if you wanted to recruit one black person from Macon, Georgia, you’d have to pay a $25,000 licensing fee, which is the equivalent of half a million dollars now.
The fact that the people left in such large numbers was a signal to the South that the lowest-caste members in the region had options and were willing to take them. That is the most important things that this migration represents—the people freed themselves in a way that the Emancipation Proclamation had not been able to do, in a way that the Civil War had not been able to resolve, in a way that the Reconstruction had not been able to resolve. It was the decisions of these people, ultimately 6 million people, that helped put incredible pressure on the South, to figure out what it was going to do. It also provided to those who stayed with some leverage, because they could now turn to those around them and say, we couldn’t have done it before, but we could leave too. It also exposed those people who were in the South and who may not have migrated ultimately, but when they went to visit their aunt or their big sister, or their cousins up north, they could see what life was like in a free place. It was not perfect, but they got a sense of what life was like, and one of the people who did this, who had obviously a tremendous impact on this country, was Martin Luther King. He was from Georgia; he actually spent time at Boston University, where he got his degree. It was there in Boston that he met the woman he would marry, Coretta Scott. He would have never have met her if there had been no Great Migration…and he had a chance to see what it was like to be on equal footing in a freer place. Then he went back to the South, and helped to fight the final, ultimate battle for freedom in the South itself. So all of this is interconnected.
The Great Migration did three things. One, it showed the South that the lowest-caste members of that system had options and were willing to take them. Two, it exposed those who were in the South still to the freedoms that were possible in the North, and that in a just world, would be available to them in the South. Thirdly, the people in the North, as is the case with many immigrant groups, they were sending money back to the South, to their mothers and their fathers and their grandparents. They were also sending money back to support the freedom movement that ultimately became the Civil Rights movement. There was an interdependence, North and South, that helped to put pressure on the country, and on the South ultimately to change, and opened up the way, ultimately, for those people to return—the children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the original people who left. That’s who’s making up what’s called a return migration, or a reverse migration. Many of them are returning to what might be considered in some ways the ancestral homeland. But they’re also part of an economic move toward the Sun Belt, along with many, many people, to places where there has been economic growth in the past 20 years.
SLM: Along the same lines, you’ve talked about the phenomenon of hypersegregation in places like Michigan, where in Detroit, you’ve got a majority African-American population, ringed by suburbs that are majority white. Which is another legacy of the Great Migration—the redlining and blockbusting that went on in the cities, which we are still feeling the effects of now.
IW: Yes, there were restrictive covenants. So what happened when they left the South, the Midwest and the West, they found resentment, hostility and a kind of invisible wall of resistance that they might not have fully understood or expected before getting there. The goal was to find a freer place, and in many respects they did find that, though they did find this invisible resistance. We are still living with the effects not just of the Great Migration itself, but the response to the Great Migration by the people who were already there. And the hypersegregation is the result of the response to all of the people; it was the panicked response of people who were fearful of the arrival of the people to the cities. Their reaction was to create and enforce these restrictive covenants. Certain houses could not be sold, and when they were sold in what had been all-white neighborhoods, the black families would find their house firebombed or attacked in other ways. Then there was the white flight, when these families did ultimately move into certain neighborhoods. So the social geography of most every city, or what has been called a receiving station of the migration, have been created by the response to the Great Migration, which means we’re still living with the effects of this great movement, even to this day.
SLM: You can definitely see it in St. Louis. It’s pretty stark. Is it that stark in other cities?
IW: It is. But in fact, certainly St. Louis is not in the top five [of the hypersegregated cities]. Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee—there is a section of the book where I list the ten most hypersegregated cities, and they were the biggest cities, primarily in the Midwest, where the Great Migration occurred. It’s beginning to change with gentrification. The children and grandchildren of the original people who fled the cities back in the ’50s and the ’60s and ’70s, their children and grandchildren now are making a great leap of faith by moving into the neighborhoods that their forebears had formerly lived in, and fled because of the Great Migration. There’s this circular reclaiming that’s going on that’s still playing itself out. We don’t know how far that will go, but it’s causing the current questions about gentrification and the impact that that has on the city. We are still dealing with the fact that the Great Migration changed the demographics of every city in the North, the Midwest and West. That is just a fact of the 20th century.
SLM: So to pan from that large, sweeping image, down to a very small concrete one—there’s a photograph of your mother in Washington, D.C., with her friend Mary, after she’d left the south. That was the photo that started the book, in a way. And maybe it wasn’t just as simple as this epiphany moment with the photo, but I did want to touch on that.
IW: There are many, many inspirations for the book. Many. Because I would say I felt a strong connection to the Joy Luck Club, for example, because that’s a story about first generation Chinese-American daughters. The mothers now expect great things because the daughters have been positioned in a higher place because of the sacrifices of the mothers. That so parallels my experience growing up in Washington, D.C. as the daughter of people who had come from the South, who had college degrees and very high expectations for themselves and for me, and made that very clear. I also felt a strong connection to The Grapes of Wrath, and felt there was no Grapes of Wrath for this Great Migration. And I’m not suggesting that this book is that, because clearly it’s nonfiction, these are real people, and I’m not suggesting that it is that. But there was not the same cinematic description of the interior wishes and dreams of hopes of the people following them as they made their journey. So those were some of the literary inspirations. I’d seen this photograph of my mother, and there weren’t many photographs that she even seemed to have of herself. It’s a beautiful photograph, and they both look so optimistic and free. It was a time, clearly, in her life that had special meaning, just that they would stop to have a photograph taken. Ultimately when I got to be a journalist, I was aware enough of what happened, and began to connect the dots of my own background, and wondered what was going through her mind? What was she, on the cusp of a new life in a new place, thinking? How did she make the decision to go there? Those were all the questions I asked for myself as I started to put together the pieces—I felt such a strong connection to other immigrants, the first generation immigrant experience, and the reality was that my mother had a whole other life, before coming to Washington D.C., you know? [Laughs.] She didn’t talk that much about it, just a little reference to her mother’s garden, just a little bit here and there, but not enough to be able to help me feel I truly understood what she had gone through. So all these things, combined were inspiration to delve into this topic, which ended up taking 15 years—way more time than I’d anticipated. If I had known how long it would take, I’m not sure I would ever have embarked upon it! As a journalist, it’s incomprehensible that you would spend 15 years on anything. But once I was in it, there was no turning back.
SLM: You pulled on lots of archival material too, I know. Was there anything you stumbled across that really surprised you there?
IK: There are so many things that I turned to, and one of the things that happens when you do this kind of work is you spend a lot of time looking at the source notes and the bibliography of each of the books you’re looking at. And at one point, I was reading a book a day. That sounds unimaginable, but when you’re looking at these sociological studies or books written by economists about the 1930s’ agricultural production in Florida, you have to go to them. There were so many books that I had to read in order to understand this world and make it come alive for the reader. But one of the pieces of archival literature that I was most excited to get my hands on was this paper written in 1883, by a historian in England. And it was his presentation to this historical society back in another two centuries ago, back in the 19th century, and I got a copy of it—it’s astounding what the technology allows us to do now. And that work was written by a man named E.G. Ravenstein, and it stands today as the seminal work that describes the human behavior that leads to migration. Which explains how all of us got to this continent on some level. It’s hard to imagine, but I could just not wait to dive into this scholarly work, because it explains so much about what they did, and why they did it. Because human behavior is wonderfully predictable. One of the things that is so beautiful about it, people often follow a particular course to get out of wherever they happen to be. And in this migration, there were three different strings, one went up the East Coast, one went essentially went up the Mississippi River from Mississippi and Alabama, Tennessee and Arkansas up to the Midwest, and then there was one that went from Louisiana out to California. He speaks about the common things human beings do when they migrate. It just helped to put into context, and explain, so much with this question that ultimately began with my mother. So this scholar from the 19th century was explaining what my mother did. And that is the connection between the archives and the people. And so most of the front end of the work was spent talking to all of these people, because I knew the archives would still be there. And of course that paper [laughs], it’s not going anywhere, and true to form, that is what happened, and I’m so glad I made that decision.
SLM: So I wanted to ask you about St. Louis’ place in the Great Migration…
IW: There was not a city in the North, the Midwest or the West that was not touched by the Great Migration. Even places like Flint, Mich., and Beloit, Wis., were receiving stations. St. Louis, in fact, there’s a seminal iconic image created by the artist Jacob Lawrence, who is one of the best-known 20th century painters. He is famous for what’s called the Migration Series, which created in the early 1940s. You can find it online—it was a panel 30 images. Once you see them, you’ll say, ah, yes, I’ve seen that before. And there’s one image in which he has at the train station, it’s one of the most famous of the entire series, and it shows St. Louis, Chicago and New York, those are the different cities…St. Louis was absolutely one of the destinations of the Great Migrations. It was freedom.
SLM: And of course you mention Miles Davis, who grew up in East St. Louis, as one of the products of the Great Migration.
IW: Of course, he would not likely have become the musician he did had he not had that freedom, and the time to practice, and the luxury to take music, which he would not have likely had if his parents had stayed in the cotton country of Arkansas. His parents were better situated than most, but you’re talking a very different region, where there were so many restrictions on what a person could do. He is one of the great legends of jazz, an art form that is a product of the Great Migration itself. And would likely would not have even existed had there not been a migration, starting with Louis Armstrong and going all the way to Thelonius Monk, whose parents migrated from North Carolina to Harlem when he was five. Then John Coltrane, who migrated from North Carolina to Philadelphia when he was 17, and got his first alto sax. These are people who are not just legends in American culture, but they are legends in world culture, cause they’re just as popular in Tokyo and Paris as they are here. So you’re talking about a gift to the world that occurred because these people had an opportunity to pursue and fulfill their God-given talents in a way that would not have been possible in the caste system that they had come from. Toni Morrison is a great example of that. She would not even have been able to go into a library and borrow a library book in Alabama, where her parents fled. They migrated from Alabama to Ohio, and had they not migrated, she would not have had access to both the kinds of schools that she was ultimately able to attend, and to the books she was exposed to, which would have been off-limits to her had her parents stayed in the South. It would be almost impossible to extract out of American culture the culture that grew out of the Great Migration, because it affects politics—most of the blue states were the states of the Great Migration. We’re dealing with it even to this day.
The overarching thing that I think is most compelling to me is that it was a leaderless revolution. It should be such an inspiration to all Americans to think about how we all got to where we are—because someone made a decision. Not because someone told them to do a certain thing, or sounded the day or the hour, but because they made a decision in their hearts about what was best at that moment for them, or for their family, or for their grandchildren or great-grandchildren that they might never see. I feel as if we all owe a debt to people in our background who did what the people in this book did. In some ways, maybe the great hope for humanity is that human beings truly can do the right thing when they are following their heart. It’s the power of the individual. These people knew that where we are is not a good place for us. We should go elsewhere. And that’s a powerful thing, that decision. And they did not view themselves as part of a movement at all. Many of them would never describe themselves as part of the Great Migration. It’s something we can now look at with the benefit of hindsight and say from 1915 to 1970, some six million people left the region we know as the American South, and went to all points North, Midwest and West, and this is the affect that they had on the country. We can now say that, but at the time they were just making the decision that was best for them at that time. And that decision shows the wisdom of the human heart.
