Wilkerson says she was blessed to get to know these people, and by the end of the book, readers will surely agree. But they also get to know three people whose lives bore marks of tragedy, courage, strength and determination. Readers of The Warmth of Other Suns get a feel for the sociological and historical ramifications of this migration as a whole, as the big picture. But it is more than just a scholarly resource it is a biography detailing the very real and human stories of three individuals who, as Wilkerson says, lived such full lives they could each have merited a book on their own.
The book could and should be used as a resource in history classrooms around the country from here on out.
She says that the book is “three projects in one: a collection of oral histories, a distillation of those oral histories into a narrative of three protagonists, and an examination of newspaper accounts and scholarly and literary works of the era and more recent analyses of the Migration to recount the motivations, circumstances, and perceptions of the Migration as it was in progress and to put the subjects’ actions into historical context.” Wilkerson spent more than a decade working on this book, interviewing more than a thousand individuals who had participated in the migration, and then narrowing the focus of her book down to the stories of three individuals who represented the stories of all the others. Author Isabel Wilkerson writes that what “historians would come to call the Great Migration … would become perhaps the biggest underreported story of the twentieth century.” She also quotes one historian as saying that “a comprehensive treatment of the century-long story of black migration does not exist,” so, in writing The Warmth of Other Suns, Wilkerson says she hopes to correct that omission. A migration of 6 million people occurred within the United States during the 20th century that went largely unrecognized: blacks left the South to live in cities in the North and West that would provide them more freedom than they could find in the Jim Crow-era South.
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