# The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson - Blinkist

What’s in it for me? Discover the untold stories of the biggest mass migration in US history.

Throughout the centuries, Americans have moved around their own country in search of a better life elsewhere.

During the Gold Rush of the 1850s, for example, 100,000 Americans from all over the country came to California hoping to find mineral riches.

But the Gold Rush – and all other inner-border mass migrations – are dwarfed by the Great Migration, which was perhaps the most significant demographic shift in American history.

From 1915 to 1970, an estimated 6 million Black men and women left behind their homes in the American South in hopes of a better life in the Northern cities of the country.

What made so many of these Black Southerners undertake this arduous journey into an uncertain future?

Why was leaving such a powerful gesture?

And how did these individual decisions compound to change America forever?

Through the real-life stories of three migrants, these blinks explore the social, historical, and personal forces behind the Great Migration.

There’s resolute Ida Mae Gladney, who left a sharecropping farm in Mississippi for urban Chigaco in the 1930s; entrepreneurial George Starling, who escaped from Florida and headed to New York in the 1940s; and ambitious Robert Foster, whose focus on a better future led him to Los Angeles in the 1950s where he would become a famous doctor.

In these blinks, you’ll learn  why the abolition of slavery didn’t mean the beginning of freedom for many Black Southerners; what prompted Ida Mae, George, and Robert to leave; and how the influx of Black migrants changed Northern cities in the US.

The Great Migration had many causes, origins, and destinations.

If you’re Black American, chances are that the threads of the Great Migration are woven into the fabric of your family history.

From around 1915 to 1970, an estimated six million Black men and women left their homes in the American South to start a new life up North.

Whether they embarked on the journey themselves or watched their relatives and friends leave, this movement affected nearly every Black American – and changed the face of the country.

The key message here is: The Great Migration had many causes, origins, and destinations.

Though the Great Migration was the biggest and most significant inner-border mass migration in US history, it remains an understudied and often misrepresented phenomenon for a few reasons.

The most tangible of these is the fact that it wasn’t a unified, single-purpose, organized movement.

Black Southerners who migrated to the Northern states didn’t consider themselves part of a movement.

Ultimately, each of them had their own complex reason for leaving.

They were tired of living as second-class citizens; scared of being lynched; fleeing personal problems; or lured by tales of money and freedom by job recruiters, friends, and relatives in the North.

There was one dominant reason for Black people’s mass exodus from the South, though: Jim Crow laws.

After slavery was formally abolished in 1865, Southern states came up with myriad ways to keep Black people from exercising their newly gained freedoms.

Dubbed “Jim Crow” after a minstrel show figure, these measures prohibited Black people from using the same facilities, shops, and services as white people.

They reinforced the practice of sharecropping, which kept Black farmers indebted to white plantation owners, and they were used to justify the gruesome lynchings of Black people by white mobs.

And so Black migrants from all over the South – from cotton plantations in Mississippi, tobacco farms in Virginia, and stifling cities across Alabama – escaped to the Northern metropolises like New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia in pursuit of a better future.

Another key influence was war.

During the First World War, the push out of the South was compounded by a pull into the North.

The war had caused labor shortages in many Northern cities, which now started sending out recruiters to solicit cheap Black labor from the South.

Once kicked off, the movement only gained momentum, peaking again during the Second World War.

In the following blinks, we’ll take a look at the real-life stories of three migrants from three different waves of the Great Migration: Ida Mae Brandon Gladley, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster.

Ida Mae and her family left their Mississippi farm for better wages and safety.

It was the summer of 1928 in Chickasaw County, Mississippi, and Ida Mae was becoming a young woman.

She had always been a bit of a tomboy, but now, at 16, boys started taking notice of the petite, fearless farmer’s daughter.

Soon, a quiet young man named George was coming by her house every Sunday, trying to win her hand in marriage.

The key message here is: Ida Mae and her family left their Mississippi farm for better wages and safety.

Ida Mae’s mother, a pragmatic woman called Miss Theenie, wasn’t thrilled about her daughter’s suitor.

A few of her children had already migrated North, and she needed any help she could get on the farm.

But George’s steadfastness eventually won over both mother and daughter, and in October 1929, the young couple was married.

Soon after, they were employed as sharecroppers and moved into a small house on a cotton plantation, which was owned by a man named Edd Pearson.

The arrangement was that George and Ida Mae would tend the cotton fields year-round and deliver the yields for Mr.

Edd to sell.

At settlement time each year, sharecroppers were expected to be given their share of the profit.

However, in practice, this calculation integrated what they “owed” the white plantation owner for the land, house, fertilizer, and whatever else he would tack on as an expense.

In the end, most sharecroppers left these settlements empty-handed.

Ida Mae and George were a bit more fortunate with Mr.

Edd, though, because he usually gave them a small sum of money.

Nevertheless, Ida Mae wasn’t very good at picking cotton, and the Great Depression was driving down the worth of their labor.

The couple found it harder and harder to support themselves and their two young children.

Then, in 1937, things got more difficult still.

George’s cousin was accused of stealing a white woman’s turkeys.

A mob of white men tracked his cousin down, tied him to a hog, and brutally assaulted him.

He survived the night but was never himself again.

For George, this was the last straw.

They would eventually leave the exploitation and violence of the racist South behind and try their luck up North – in Illinois, where George’s brother and Ida Mae’s older sister already lived.

At first, Ida Mae was reluctant to leave her mother and younger sister behind.

But George had made up his mind for the both of them.

So they waited for their next settlement to raise money for their big journey.

And in the autumn of 1937, the young family boarded an overcrowded Jim Crow car on a Northbound train and made their way to a new life.

George Starling fled Florida to avoid persecution for labor organizing.

George Starling grew up on his father’s cotton and tobacco farm in Eustis, Florida.

But he envisioned a different life for himself.

He wanted to go to college – a pretty big dream for a Black child from the South in the 1930s.

George was a great student, and after being one of the few kids to graduate from his all-Black high school, he got accepted to the Agricultural and Mechanical State College in Tallahassee.

The key message here is: George Starling fled Florida to avoid persecution for labor organizing.

George loved his new student life in Florida.

But his father never really saw the point of this education.

So, while in his sophomore year, his father simply told him he could no longer afford the tuition.

George was furious.

To spite his father, he decided to marry his high-school sweetheart, Inez.

But now he had a wife to support, and so he had no choice but to return to Eustis, where – like so many other young Black men in Florida – he found work picking oranges and grapefruits.

In addition, he took any odd gig he could find.

His plan was to make enough money to send Inez to beauty school so that, eventually, he would be able to continue his education, too.

One summer during the Second World War, he spent some months working at the Chrysler factory in Detroit.

When he returned, the working conditions in the South suddenly felt unbearable to him.

Fruit pickers, for example, were paid only a few cents per box of fruit despite having to climb dangerously high into the trees for their work.

George decided to start working on the farms again – and to lead his fellow pickers in a strike to demand a higher price for their precarious work.

The labor shortages as a consequence of the Second World War worked in their favor; the plantation owners had little choice but to meet their demands.

After organizing multiple strikes on different plantations, George started to gain a reputation as a troublemaker.

His friends and family were especially concerned that one of these white plantation owners would eventually exact some gruesome revenge.

That’s when he decided it was time to leave Florida for good.

He would try his luck in New York and send for Inez once he got settled.

George traveled lightly and quietly, so as to not arouse suspicion.

He boarded the Silver Meteor train up the east coast, and as the train crossed the invisible line into the North, he watched as the “white” and “colored” signs above the rail cars went blank.

In the North, the train was no longer segregated.

That’s when he knew he’d made the right decision.

Pershing Foster left Louisiana to further his career without the restrictions of Jim Crow.

In 1930s Monroe, Louisiana, everybody knew the Foster family.

Madison Foster was the principal of the local Black high school, and his wife, Ottie, was a long-time teacher there.

Despite making less than half of what white teachers in the area earned, the Fosters were a high-minded and ambitious couple.

They had already sent their oldest son, Madison, to medical school – a remarkable feat for a Black family in the South – and they had equally high expectations for his younger brother, Pershing.

Here’s the key message: Pershing Foster left Louisiana to further his career without the restrictions of Jim Crow.

Pershing was a good student, but growing up in the shadow of his brilliant older brother wasn’t always easy.

To distinguish himself, he’d developed an exuberant, outgoing charm that would later open many doors for him.

With some pressure from his family, Pershing went to Atlanta in 1937 to attend the prestigious, all-Black Morehouse College.

There, he didn’t just excel at his undergraduate studies – he also won the heart of the College president’s daughter, Alice Clement.

Soon, they were married, and Alice gave birth to two baby girls.

Pershing didn’t get to see much of his young family for the next few years, though.

After Morehouse, he went on to Meharry Medical College in Nashville, leaving Alice with her family in Atlanta.

After medical school, he had to report for military duty in Texas, and was eventually stationed at a base in Austria.

There, he gained a reputation as a charming and brilliant young surgeon.

When he returned to Louisiana, the absurdity of the Jim Crow restrictions of the South stood out to him.

Overseas, he had been a renowned military surgeon.

But in Fort Polk, where he was discharged, he wasn’t even allowed to practice at the local hospital.

He felt that it was time to leave, and he had a place in mind: Los Angeles.

The glamor of Hollywood seemed like a good fit for his boisterous personality.

And in California, he would have the freedom to be as excellent at his job as he wanted to be.

So in the summer of 1953, Pershing set out alone by car.

When he pulled into L.

A.

, he only had a dollar left in his pocket.

But his heart was full of hope – this was a place where he could lead the life he wanted.

To shed the last vestiges of his Southern heritage, he even changed his name.

From now on, he would go by Robert Pershing Foster.

In Chicago, Ida Mae became part of the new urban Black working class.

When Ida Mae walked out of the train station onto the busy streets of Chicago for the first time, the city “looked like heaven” to her.

She had never seen so many people all at once!

For now, though, Chicago wasn’t the final destination for Ida Mae and her young family.

They were headed to Milwaukee, where her sister would receive them.

The key message here is: In Chicago, Ida Mae became part of the new urban Black working class.

For a few months, the family tried to get settled in Milwaukee.

But, unfortunately, they’d arrived at the height of the Great Depression.

That meant that even the tough, low-paying jobs at the steel factories and slaughterhouses that Black migrants were typically offered, were becoming scarce.

When Ida Mae went back to Mississippi for a few months to give birth to her third and final child, George decided he would try his luck in Chicago.

He found a job assisting an ice vendor, and the modest wage allowed him to rent a one-bedroom basement apartment in the city.

Ida Mae and the children followed soon after.

At the time, there were so many Black migrants moving into Chicago that the city was completely overcrowded.

The white neighborhoods sealed themselves off, which meant the newcomers were forced to move around from one tiny, overpriced apartment to the next.

In addition, white working class immigrants and Northern-born Black people didn’t take kindly to the new arrivals from the South.

Many of them worked service jobs as waiters, janitors, porters, and maids – they weren’t too happy about the extra competition.

Women from the South had a particularly hard time finding jobs because they were perceived as both uneducated and less suited than men for hard, industrial work.

Some were forced to sell their labor at virtual “slave markets” on street corners, where white women bid on them to do domestic tasks for as little as 15 cents an hour.

At long last, Ida Mae found a job as a hospital aide at Walther Memorial on the West Side of Chicago.

Soon, she and George were able to move into a slightly nicer apartment, and they settled into their new urban life.

From the outside, it didn’t seem as though they lived that much more comfortably than before.

But they did make some immaterial gains they would never have dreamed of in the South.

In the 1940 presidential election between Franklin D.

Roosevelt and his Republican challenger, for example, Ida Mae voted for the very first time in her life.

Working as a train attendant in New York, George witnessed the Great Migration.

Harlem, New York, was unlike anything George Starling had ever seen before.

First established as a colony of former slaves in the nineteenth century, it had become the center of Black cultural life in New York City by the time he arrived in 1945.

And even though the apartments were cramped and living costs expensive, the vibrant street life of Harlem made George feel truly free for the first time.

After crashing at his aunt’s place for a while, he managed to find a job at the railroad, and soon he found his own little apartment in the district.

The key message here is: Working as a train attendant in New York, George witnessed the Great Migration.

George was now working as a train attendant on trains just like the one he had taken from Florida.

Traveling between the North and the South multiple times a week for decades, he accompanied the journeys of thousands of migrants like himself.

His official job was to help people with their luggage and show them to their seats.

But for the Black migrants coming from the South, he double-functioned as a counselor and guide to the new world.

He also marveled at all the things they brought with them from the Old Country.

One time, an older woman was carrying a giant watermelon in her hatbox.

Inez joined George in New York a few months after his arrival, and she quickly found a job as a nurse.

Soon, the couple were living with their two children, Gerard and Sonya, in a small apartment in Harlem.

Though his work constantly reminded him of his roots, for a long time George was too afraid to visit the South.

In December 1951, he received a painful reminder of why he’d left.

A friend of his from Eustis, former NAACP organizer Harry Moore, had been killed by a bomb planted in his house.

The violence and terror of the Jim Crow South never really left George.

He would continue to push back against the system in small, direct ways in his everyday life.

For example, when the civil rights movement was in full swing, he used his job to collect donations for some of the causes.

And after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 finally outlawed segregation in every sphere of public life, George encouraged the Black train passengers to claim their rights to equal treatment.

Robert immediately fell in love with L.

A.

In L.A., Robert made a name for himself as a famous and reputable doctor.

But like many Black migrants arriving from the South, he faced some initial difficulties in the new world before finding his path.

First, he needed to make enough money to bring his wife and daughters to California.

And he knew they were expecting a certain level of comfort after having lived in Alice’s family villa in Atlanta for several years.

The key message here is: In L.

A.

, Robert made a name for himself as a famous and reputable doctor.

Robert’s first job was as a medical examiner for a Black insurance company – a job well below his level of expertise.

Basically, his task was to go around L.

A.

and collect urine samples from the company’s customers.

Still, he made the most of this demeaning job, using his charm to build up a patient base of his own.

When he felt that he had a solid foundation for his own medical practice, he rented an office space and a modest apartment, and invited his wife and kids to finally join him.

But when they arrived, Robert and his wife had to reckon with the fact that in their 12 years of marriage, they hadn’t really spent very much time together.

Apart from hosting fancy dinner parties for their new L.

A.

social circle, they had very few common interests.

In contrast to his rocky marriage, Robert’s career was booming.

People were coming from all over L.

A.

to be treated by him.

He could now afford a big, luxurious house for his family and could engage in more frivolous things like buying a Cadillac and getting into gambling.

His reputation continued to burgeon.

For instance, one night in 1961, Robert received a panicked call from a woman: her husband had badly cut his hand on a glass table and was losing a frightening amount of blood.

The woman’s husband turned out to be none other than the great Ray Charles.

Robert fixed the famous musician’s hand – and even accompanied him on his next tour to take care of the wound.

That’s how he ended up in Ray Charles’s 1962 song Hide Nor Hair: But I ain't seen hide 'nor hair of my baby since she went awayIf Dr.

Foster has got her then I know I'm throughBecause he's got medicine and money too Ray Charles’s song immortalized Robert and his success story.

He had come from a Southern town that refused to let him practice his craft and became one of the most successful surgeons in Hollywood.

For many Black Southerners, the North wasn’t the carefree land of their dreams.

Black migrants like Ida Mae, George, and Robert left the Jim Crow South in hopes of a better life in the Northern cities.

This meant they had to leave behind everything they knew, which often included older family members, friends, and sometimes even spouses.

But like most other migrants, they believed that anything was better than where they’d started out.

This doesn’t mean that once they’d reached their destinations – whether Chicago, New York, or L.

A.

– life was all sunshine and roses.

The key message here is: For many Black Southerners, the North wasn’t the carefree land of their dreams.

At many points throughout the Great Migration, but especially during the two world wars, Northern cities actively solicited Black labor from the South.

Once they arrived, though, Black workers didn’t exactly receive a warm welcome.

The jobs they got in the city – mostly as factory and service workers – were slightly better paid than in the South but were equally exhausting.

In addition, many cities, like Chicago, soon started to strain under the weight of so many new arrivals.

Most Southern migrants lived in stuffy, overpriced apartments in all-Black neighborhoods.

And because white workers weren’t especially keen on sharing their living space, cities like Chicago and New York became – unofficially – as segregated as the South.

And, of course, every migrant had their own, unique stories of failure, loss, and heartbreak.

Ida Mae experienced the devaluation of Black neighborhoods in Chicago first-hand, when her family was finally able to afford a nice house on the South Side of the city in the late 1960s.

Soon after they moved, their white neighbors deserted the district one by one, causing the property values to drop significantly.

By the 1990s, this once middle-class neighborhood was marked by poverty and the resultant crime and drugs.

In New York, George, for his part, struggled with the resentment he had toward the South and his impulsive marriage to Inez.

The city brought its own share of problems for his family, too.

His son Gerard fell in with the wrong crowd and would later struggle with drug addiction for the rest of his life.

In Robert’s case, his outwardly successful, over-the-top lifestyle concealed a lackluster marriage and a lifelong inferiority complex.

Toward the end of his career, he would gamble so egregiously that it wasn’t unusual for him to win or lose ten thousand dollars in one night.

Still, none of them ever regretted their decision.

For many Black Southerners, leaving the South was an expression of freedom.

By the end of the Great Migration in the 1970s, nearly half of all Black Americans were living in the North – compared to only 10 percent when the movement began.

In Chicago alone, the Black population rose from 44,000 to over one million.

So, was it all worth it?

Were the Black migrants who left the South really better off in the North?

Analyzing the rising levels of poverty and crime, as well as housing crises and riots in the Northern cities, many social scientists have concluded that the answer is “no.

” But these analyses fail to take into consideration the deep personal meaning the movement had for many Black Americans.

Here’s the key message: For many Black Southerners, leaving the South was an expression of freedom.

Even though the North was hardly the promised land they had dreamed of, few Black Southerners ever regretted their decision to leave.

For many, the simple act of leaving the South was a powerful expression of their independence as American citizens – a status they had only recently been granted, and something which many white people in the South actively rejected.

In the end, a sense of purpose and the pursuit of prosperity would outweigh the losses, failures, and disappointments experienced along the way.

And although their lives were full of setbacks, Robert, George, and Ida Mae prevailed.

After a long and illustrious career, Robert died in 1997, leaving behind two successful daughters.

He was so adamant about affirming his new Northern identity that he never returned to the South, and was buried in L.

A.

George succeeded just by surviving the South.

Though he felt safe enough to visit the Old Country again in later years, it always left him with an uneasy feeling.

He died in 1998.

Ida Mae survived both of them, perhaps because she was the happiest of the three.

She adjusted to the North as much as she needed to, but never forgot her Southern heritage.

Until her death in 2004, and despite having lived in Chicago for over 60 years, she still spoke in a deep Mississippi drawl.

Robert Foster, George Starling, and Ida Mae Gladney are just three out of millions of Black migrants from the South who took their fates into their own hands.

Over 60 years and two world wars, their individual decisions would compound to transform the American demographic landscape, culture, and society.

Final summary

The key message in these blinks: The Great Migration was the most significant mass migration in American history.

Over the span of around 60 years, six million Black men, women, and children left their home in the Jim Crow South to live in Northern cities like New York, Chicago, and L.

A.

They each had their unique reasons for leaving, but their movement changed the US forever.

While many of them did not find the carefree life they’d dreamed of up North, few of them regretted taking the leap.

To many Black Southerners, migrating was an assertion of their freedom.

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What to read next: Black and British, by David Olusoga The Warmth of Other Suns explored the real-life stories of three Black migrants who played a part in one of the most significant mass movements in American history.

If you liked hearing about this relatively understudied, formative historical movement, you might be interested to learn of another from across the Atlantic – namely, the story of Black people in Britain.

Check out our blinks to Black and British, by British-Nigerian historian David Olusoga, to discover the big plotlines and key events that have shaped Britain today.