Isabel Wilkerson traces Great Migration travails
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Isabel Wilkerson will speak here Monday.
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Isabel Wilkerson did not know it would take 15 years to research and write her first book, "The Warmth of Other Suns," a poetic, epic account of three African-Americans who fled the Jim Crow South to find opportunities for a better life.
"I'm glad I didn't know. For a journalist, 15 years is a lifetime, multiple lifetimes. Once I got into it, there was no way I could turn back," said the author, who grew up in Washington, D.C., and worked for The New York Times as its Chicago bureau chief.
In that way, she was like Dr. Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, one of the book's three protagonists. He left Monroe, La., for Los Angeles. With unwavering determination, Dr. Foster started a family and established a successful medical practice.
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Dr. Foster was part of the Great Migration, which began around World War I and continued through the 1970s, dispersing 6 million African-Americans throughout the nation.
"It reshaped American culture. The blue states are blue, in part, because of this Great Migration," Ms. Wilkerson said.
Scholarly works focus on the economics of this major population shift, but Ms. Wilkerson could not find any book that, "puts you in the car as they are driving or on the train where they are passengers. I had to race against the clock in order to find these people," she said.
For nearly two years, she interviewed prospective subjects, finally settling on the lives of three people: Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, who wound up in Chicago; George Swanson Starling, who left Florida's citrus groves for New York, and Dr. Foster.
"These people left warm places. That shows how desperate they were to find a better place for themselves," Ms. Wilkerson said.
The author knew her father, a Tuskegee Airman, had left Petersburg, Va., by car and that her mother took the Silver Comet train out of Rome, Ga. The couple met in Washington, D.C.
"I would not even have existed had there been no Great Migration because my parents would never have met," she said.
Ms. Wilkerson retraced Dr. Foster's journey by renting a Buick Roadmaster and traveling the route he described. Her parents came along for the trip.
"We got to the part where he had assumed he would not have trouble finding a place to stay once he got past Texas. He could not find a place to stay in three states. We got to the part where it was night in Phoenix and he was looking for a room. We didn't take the interstates. We took the side roads."
Ms. Wilkerson persisted in driving but began to fall asleep at the wheel.
Her mother insisted that she stop, saying, "We lived through that. We'll tell you about it."
The author and her parents did not worry about finding a place to stay and could choose a motel.
"I felt even more empathy for Dr. Foster because he had not had that choice," Ms. Wilkerson said.
Ms. Wilkerson pursued her efforts to humanize the Great Migration because she wanted "people to know what people bore up under.
"They left that experience without bitterness. They did not let that stop them from dreaming and believing and hoping to find a place they could thrive."
First Published January 28, 2012 12:00 am
