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The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, by Isabel Wilkerson. New York, NY: Random House, 2010. 622pp. $30.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780679444329.
In the classic Black Boy, Richard Wright concludes his autobiographic tome by writing, "I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns, and, perhaps, to bloom." It is from Wright's prose that Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson draws her title and inspiration for her first book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration. Much has been written about the Great Migration (1910-1970) - the six-million-strong African American flights from the U.S. South. Scrutinized by economists, historians, and sociologists, the dramatic interplay of variables that constrained and enabled migration has been well rehearsed. Wilkerson takes a different, but complementary, tack. She seeks to tell the "larger emotional truths" of the Migration in such ways that spotlight "people's interior lives and motivations" (p. 13). Still, she does not shy away from larger social and political implications of blacks' grand departure from the "Old Country." Just as Wright chose to flee 1920s Mississippi replete with poverty, nihilism, and Jim Crow, Wilkerson contends that this movement was more than a demographic shift, but an action of then-unparalleled collective black agency: "[I]t was the first big step the nation's servant class ever took without...