The Warmth of Other Suns

 

Book type: U.S. History

Summary: In her book, Isabel Wilkerson follows three members of the Great Migration (the exodus of six million black Americans between the years of 1915 and 1970 from the bitter world of the Jim Crow South to the North and West of the country): Dr. Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, and George Swanson Starling. Robert Foster left small-town Monroe, Louisiana for the glitz and glam of Los Angeles, Ida Mae left rural Mississippi with her husband and young children in the hopes of escaping sharecropping for a better life in Chicago, and George Starling left backwoods Florida with its endless citrus groves for a life in Harlem, although he spent little time there as he became a railway porter who traveled most of the time. These three individuals’ stories, like so many others, tell of the difficulty in leaving the only life they may have ever known, leaving much of their family, and making a long and difficult journey to places they’d mostly only heard of before. Her narrative of America’s Great Migration has a lot to offer in the way of lessons, both about [black] American history and about life for all people, regardless of their ethnicity. Here are just a few lessons from The Warmth of Other Suns.

 

Lessons:

1. Don’t be too proud. It’s one thing to be proud of one’s accomplishments, one’s children, one’s community; that pride is a propelling force in people’s lives which causes joy and happiness and can help people to become their best selves. It’s quite another to be proud of something that intentionally or unintentionally degrades other people. When we’re too proud of being “real” Americans, Chicagoans, New Yorkers, and so forth, we separate ourselves from other groups and fail to see them and their struggles for what they are. When we become too proud we gloss over the shortcomings in our past and attempt to create a world just for us so that we’ll be the most comfortable, unconcerned with the troubles of those around us. What we should do is to take a lesson from Ida Mae Brandon Gladney: “She had a way of looking past the outer layer of people and seemed to regard everyone she met with a kind of searching intensity, as if this were the first person she had ever seen” (21). Imagine how we would all be if we approached each new person from a perspective of genuine interest in who they are or what their story is, versus thinking that we can figure out who they are or what motivates them just based on how they dress, what type of accent they have, or the color of their skin. Humility helps with a lot of things and so does genuine interest in people as just that, people, not representatives of anything but themselves in that moment.
2. Caste systems keep everyone in prison (33). Jim Crow laws and de facto segregation whether in the South or the North after the Civil War hurt all Americans, black, white, or otherwise. Social rules that seek to keep certain groups at bay not only hurt the people who are ostracized, they hurt those within the main group as well by sheltering them from the realities of other people’s lives. One prime example that Wilkerson gives in The Warmth of Other Suns is about how people in white neighborhoods would fear that if black people moved in their property values would drop, and this fear caused them to invest less in their own community, which thereby lowered property values. So by the time all the white people left because their neighborhood was no longer worth as much as it had been, it was actually their own doing and not the result of the black families who moved in (376-377). When we separate ourselves from entire groups of people we are unable–and generally unwilling–to accept that they may not be the awful things that we think they are. Bars keep people on both sides in prison, whether they realize it or not, as we’ll see in lesson #4.
3. Leaving the South didn’t always mean leaving Jim Crow behind. There are several stories in Wilkerson’s book about people leaving the South only to find the North or West could be even more confusing than the Jim Crow laws they were used to. One story is of George Starling and a friend having a drink at a bar in Manhattan (obviously the fact that they could do this in the first place was a primary difference between North and South). When they finally got up to leave the bar–full of white patrons except for themselves–the bartender made it a point to break the glasses they’d used, rather than wash them and use them for the next customer. And for Dr. Robert Foster, he found that even after he’d made it past the dividing line of El Paso, Texas on his drive to Los Angeles in 1953, still no motels along his route through Arizona would rent him a room for the night, despite brightly lit vacancy signs out front along the road. Each time he inquired they would say that they’d just booked the last room. Yet they would never turn the sign off outside. In the South the people who were now leaving had known what to expect at a restaurant, gas station, or motel. On the borders of the North and West, they had no idea: “The border sentiments spilled over into a general protocol that colored people had to live by. It determined whether or how easily they might find a room or food. They could look silly asking for a colored restroom in a border town that felt more northern than southern and presumptuous in a town that felt the opposite (200). And in some places like California, the rules were practically unknowable. “‘In certain plants, Mexicans and whites worked together,’ the Works Progress Administration reported. ‘ In some others, white workers accepted Negroes and objected to Mexicans. In others, white workers accepted Mexicans and objected to Japanese. White women worked with Mexican and Italian women, but refused to work with Negroes….In the General Hospital, Negro nurses attended white patients, but were segregated from white nurses in dining halls: in a manufacturing plant white workers refused to work with Negroes, but worked under a Negro foreman'” (233-234). Being free still wasn’t easy.
4. The past isn’t really past. The choices that every generation makes have reverberating effects down through history. Our problems today are directly linked to our past failures and our unwillingness to accept responsibility for them. As Wilkerson notes,
   

   People like Ida Mae had few options, and the landlords knew it. New arrivals often paid twice the rent charged the whites they had just replaced for worn-out and ill-kept housing. “The rents in the South Side Negro district [of Chicago] were conspicuously the highest of all districts visited,” [University of Chicago researcher] Abbott wrote. Dwellings that went for eight to twenty dollars a month to white families were bringing twelve to forty-five dollars a month from black families, those earning the least income and thus least able to afford a flat at any rent, in the early stages of the Migration. Thus began a pattern of overcharging and underinvestment in black neighborhoods that would lay the foundation for decades of economic disparities in the urban North. […] The story played out in virtually every northern city–migrants sealed off in overcrowded colonies that would become the foundation for ghettos that would persist into the next century (270).

   Additionally, if your ancestors were white and had wealth or assets, these could be passed down and multiplied over generations. If your great-grandparents and grandparents were black southern sharecroppers in the 1940s and ’50s and each year had to content themselves to “break even” with, or worse, be indebted to the white property owner for whom they worked, they could never amass any wealth or assets to pass down to their heirs (85). But regardless of your race, if your ancestors were advantaged or disadvantaged by the economic or social system they lived in, your wealth today may be directly linked to theirs fifty or a hundred years ago. And don’t even get me started on debt peonage. Lastly, the way northern communities are structured now, and the interactions people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds have on a day-to-day basis, is directly related to the choices made primarily by white people during the Great Migration. Sociologist Gunnar Myrdal wrote that in the North, “‘[A]lmost everybody is against discrimination in general, but, at the same time, almost everybody practices discrimination in his own personal affairs’–that is, by not allowing blacks into unions or clubhouses, certain jobs, and white neighborhoods, indeed, avoiding social interaction overall. ‘It is the culmination of all these personal discriminations,’ he continued, ‘which creates the color bar in the North, and, for the Negro causes unusually severe unemployment, crowded housing conditions, crime and vice. About this social process, the ordinary white Northerner keeps sublimely ignorant and unconcerned'” (387). These cold and shortsighted actions half a century ago still mean that today blacks and whites in the North are just as segregated, if not more so, than they were in the South in 1910: “By the end of the twentieth century, blacks would make up more than eighty percent of the population of Detroit. Just across the Ford Expressway, the black population of the suburb of Dearborn, the 2000 census found, was one percent” (378). When we refuse to live with people and see them for who they are, we separate ourselves to both our detriment, sometimes resulting in the worst things imaginable, like the deaths of our community’s youth, as was the case with nineteen-year-old Renisha McBride who was shot in the face on the porch of a Dearborn Heights man’s home just outside of Detroit last year (see the Detroit Free Press’ coverage here).

5. Do not do spite. Both Robert Foster and George Starling believed in this lesson. In Foster’s opinion, “…Spite never settled anything. It only gave your detractors more ammunition and, as it had back when the colored people in Monroe had urinated in the colored section of the Paramount Theater, only ended up hurting the people themselves” (409). For Starling, the effect of spite was a lifelong one. He had married his wife Inez to spite his father when his father told him he wouldn’t pay for his college anymore. Their marriage was an unhappy one, ill-prepared as they were to be together for the rest of their lives. He always regretted it: “He took every chance he got to warn young people not to make his mistakes, not knowing if they heard him but feeling he had to get it out. ‘That’s why I preach today, do not do spite,’ he said. ‘Spite does not pay. It goes around and misses the object that you aim and comes back and zaps you. And you’re the one who pays for it'” (421).

 

A final review/recommendation:

The Warmth of Other Suns is a compelling history of the black people who left the South over several decades in the hopes of finding greater freedom and opportunity elsewhere in the country. Wilkerson notes that these people didn’t see themselves as being part of a movement the way civil rights protestors saw themselves; they just knew they needed to get out. Regardless of their reasons for leaving, it took great courage and determination to make new lives for themselves in places like New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, and Los Angeles. The newly-arrived immigrants faced high housing costs, shrinking job markets, and environments they could never have imagined before arriving. And they survived. I highly recommend Wilkerson’s book to anyone who doesn’t know the reality of who really migrated to the North and West, why they did it, and what they faced in doing so. For anyone who thinks our current social and economic problems in major cities like Detroit, Cincinnati, and St. Louis are simply because of the failings of the southern people who came in droves during the Migration, read this book and learn how our problems’ origins aren’t so simple after all.

Wilkerson’s book is interesting, keeps a good pace, and has real-life characters that are endearing and heartbreaking at the same time. Although the book skips around a lot, once you know the three main characters well enough, it’s easy to follow. The only thing that I found slightly irritating in the book is that Wilkerson often repeats small stories as though you haven’t already read them thirty pages before. I don’t know if this was intentional because she expected readers would forget the story quickly, or if she wrote the sections out of order and didn’t realize she’d already covered something (and then her editor missed these as well), but having the same story explained more than once seemed like a waste of space in the book. Luckily this wasn’t an overwhelming issue and I thoroughly enjoyed the book, as you may too if you’re interested in learning about American history or black history–whether it’s Black History Month anymore or not.

 

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