Summary Of The Temperature Of Other Suns By Isabel Wilkerson

Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration delves into the great exodus of Southern blacks to the North from World War I to the 1970s. While this in an already acknowledged period of Southern and American history, the book is still an important source in Southern studies. For one, the book provides students with three extensive firsthand accounts of the period, something they may not have been exposed to before. Meanwhile, some may argue that since a great portion of the stories take place during the lives of the subjects while in the North, that the book technically does not include enough Southern history to be a viable resource. However, those periods in the North makes readers acutely aware
All of the stories are heartbreaking in some way, but the later years of George and Robert in particular makes readers realize how much the migrants lost to better their lives and that of their families. Robert sacrificed a close relationship with his daughters and his wife so they could always fit into California society by requiring high standards for each and George would lose his son to the drug scene in the North (Wilkerson 462,489, 512-513). Then there were the racial problems that still plagued the non-segregated North as whites reacted to blacks becoming an increasing part of their community. Wilkerson tells of incidents like the story of the Clark family who were run out of their new apartment in an all-white neighborhood of Chicago for being black and the ensuing race riot (372-376). Knowing that even with these losses and the harsh conditions of the North that their lives were still better than when they were in the South, allows the audience to understand just how bad things were below the Mason-Dixon