Sharing moving accounts of the Great Migration

September 16, 2010|David Shribman

They called it the Great Migration, the movement of nearly 6 million blacks from the South to the North and to California between 1915 and 1970 — a wave that, like the great American migrations that preceded it, was one of discovery and disappointment, of mystery and misery, of heroism and hope, that transformed the participants even as it changed the places they settled — and the places they left.

This great migration, much ignored until recently, was also a moment of great decision, both for the emigrants and for the nation. These individuals left one part of their own country for another, without leaders, sometimes without money or skills, often without a clear idea of where they were going — but always with a clear idea of why. Uprooted and their lives upended, they were fired with faith and fortitude — and a determination to find a better chance.

“They fled as if under a spell or a high fever,’’ writes Isabel Wilkerson, biographer of a movement and sculptor of one of the most lyrical and important books of the season. “The Warmth of Other Suns,’’ written by the daughter of participants in this great wave, is a monument to deep research and even deeper reflection and will sit comfortably for decades on bookshelves beside Oscar Handlin’s “The Uprooted,’’ which won a Pulitzer Prize nearly six decades ago.

Fleeing a Jim Crow society and taking advantage of a northern labor shortage growing out of World War I, this movement of men and women two generations removed from slavery would boost the black population of Chicago from 44,103 to more than a million. It would integrate cities. It would reshape work, traffic, and marriage patterns. But it was more than that. “[I]t was,’’ she writes, “the first big step the nation’s servant class ever took without asking.’’

Richard Wright was only one of the millions who would feel what he called “the warmth of other suns’’ in “Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth’’ — the work from which Wilkerson took her title — and whose worldview and work would be transformed by it. In one way or another, to one degree or another, this sun warmed — this sun baked — the lives of Langston Hughes, B.B. King, August Wilson, Ralph Ellison, and millions of others.

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