Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: Isabel, thanks so much for doing this interview. I love your book. Your book is historic. Congratulations.
Isabel Wilkerson: Thank you so much.
Gates: What is the Great Migration? When did it start, when did it end, how many people were involved, and why is it important?
Wilkerson: The Great Migration was an outpouring of six million African Americans from the South to the North and West. It was, in many ways, what I call a defection from the Jim Crow caste system; the system that ruled the lives of all people--even White people--who were living in the South. This caste system held everyone in a fixed place. And so there was an outpouring of people who left the South for all points North and West from 1915 to 1970, when the initial reasons for the migration were no longer in effect--meaning the caste system essentially came to an end, legally.
Gates: Well, we have all heard various interpretations and explanations for this defection. I love the metaphor of the defection. That's very original and very profound. You interviewed over 1000 people, you spent fifteen years thinking about and writing this book. What do you think the ultimate reasons for this defection were?
Wilkerson: I think one ultimate reason was a kind of seeking of political asylum, which we don't often think about when you look at the North and West and the cities that came to be, and that people just happened to be there. My questions were: How did they get there? Why did they leave? What were the circumstances that propelled them to leave? What was life like for them in the South and what was life like for them, ultimately, in the North and West? And what was it that gave them that drive, that perseverance, that restlessness to make the decision of their lives: to leave the only place that they had ever known for a place that they had never seen and hope that life would be better? I really wanted to understand that. That is the reason why I set out to find three people who would represent the three streams of...