An Enormous Book of Enormous Consequence

The Neland Women’s Book Club met tonight (yes, they’ve met more often than I have recorded, because I’ve been unable to attend for a couple of months now). We talked about The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. This book is about the Great Migration, the massive movement of African Americans from the southern states to the north in the 20^th century. I’ll say right now that I did not finish the book, so some of this is inferred information from the group. Ladies, if I have something wrong, please correct me in the comments!

Our leader of the month, Sue, helped us wade through the issues and information presented by the book. She mentioned that Wilkerson is a journalist, the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for journalism in 1994. She was interested in the subject of the migration because of her own parents’ migration, and she spent 15 years researching and interviewing 1200 people for this project.

Between World War I and the 1970s about 6 million African Americans migrated north. That’s in comparison, for example, to the 300,000 “Okies” who famously left the Oklahoma area for the west coast during the Dust Bowl. Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and an extremely restrictive caste system led the people of the Great Migration to leave all they knew, in mostly rural areas, to have more freedoms and opportunities. Unfortunately, they tended to find it difficult to gain employment, restricted housing options and cities infected with crime.

The recently migrated were willing to work hard to make a life for themselves, but their children found it frustrating to live with a lack of prospects, and they were living in community with African-Americans who had already been living in the north and who were already frustrated.

Wilkerson uses a form called narrative nonfiction to follow three people in particular: Ida Mae Gladney, Robert Foster and George Starling. Sue noted that George was from the same area in Florida where Trayvon Martin lost his life. Wilkerson says she used three books as her models: The Grapes of Wrath, Avalon, and The Joy Luck Club.

I personally was utterly floored to find out that immediately after emancipation, former slaves had many rights, and that those were slowly taken away. I had always been under the impression that Jim Crow laws were pretty much in force from Day 1 after emancipation. And so the former slaves, who had at least a forced and artificial relationship with the white community, had children and grandchildren who had basically zero relationship with the white community. The white community over the years built up a sort of hysteria, basically psychotically afraid of giving black neighbors any power or rights.

Sue said that it is amazing to realize that all of this happened basically in her lifetime, and she was so unaware. Alice said it is one of the saddest books she’s ever read, but she hastened to add that it was excellent. Both of them remembered a time long ago in their Chicago-area neighborhood when the white church community there felt threatened by the arrival of African Americans.

The only criticism that we heard was that the book was somewhat repetitive. That criticism was, fittingly enough, repeated by several people. However, there was some feeling that with all the information presented, some repetition helps the reader retain the important points.

We talked some about how this informs our perspective on our own town of Grand Rapids. Certainly people migrated to GR, and GR suffered white flight. We questioned the role of Christian schools in making our city more segregated, since in the early days the Christian schools served a white community. We wonder how much racism prevails even now, when we don’t even realize it.

A line from the book about Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, who was a educated as a medical doctor and ran into obstacles everywhere he went because of his skin color: “Still it made no sense to Pershing that one set of people could be in a cage, and the people outside couldn’t see the bars.” What bars are right in front of us that we never notice? And how does that affect us in ways that we don’t realize?

In a speech, Wilkerson said this: “I believe that the next migration has to be for us as individuals, as human beings, to recognize that we have so much more in common than we are led to believe. And to recognize that when everyone does better, everyone does better."