I am in awe of author Isabel Wilkerson and her masterful ability to write this impressive epic account. I am in awe of this remarkable book. If all history books were written like this one, everyone would read history—and love it. I am in awe of all those who made the Great Migration—for their courage, fortitude, and ability to envision an unknown future in a strange land that was not particularly welcoming.
The Great Migration had no leader. It was not organized. It just happened. One by one they walked away from their homes. Wilkerson describes it as a “leaderless revolution.” Over six decades from about 1916 to 1970, about six million Blacks living in the South left the only place they had ever known for various northern and western cities. Some had relatives or friends who had made the journey ahead of them so that is why they escaped to Cleveland or New York or Chicago or Los Angeles, as opposed to any other city. And an escape it was. Escape from harsh conditions, both economic and physical. The Jim Crow laws ensured no Black could ever truly prosper or reach his or her full potential. Lynchings were commonplace and used to terrify Blacks and keep them in their place. Even though they were no longer enslaved, many felt they still had to leave in secrecy under the cloak of darkness or they would be stopped—perhaps violently.
When all these Blacks started leaving the South, the South didn’t notice at first until seemingly overnight no one was left to pick cotton or tend the fields. Huh? Where did they all go?
The most riveting part of this book is the focus on three people who made the great migration, whom Wilkerson selected from among 1,200 people she interviewed: • Ida Mae Brandon Gladney (migrated in 1937), a pregnant sharecropper’s wife with two young children, who fled Mississippi for Chicago. • George Swanson Starling (migrated in 1945), a hotheaded man who was seeking his own form of justice and skipped out of Eustis, Florida for Harlem, New York hours before angry white men wanted to hang him. • Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, M.D. (migrated in 1953), a surgeon who was not allowed by Louisiana law to practice in a hospital and so he drove all alone across the country to California in search of a place where he could be a physician.
These three never knew each other. Their stories are unconnected. But their stories—what life was like for them in the South, why they made the decision to leave, what happened on their treacherous and long journey north or west, and then how they adapted—are fascinating and the stuff of the best novels. Except it’s all true.
Bonus: Be sure to read “Notes on Methodology” at the end of the book, which admittedly sounds very academic, but it’s fascinating—and even made me cry at the end.
This is a captivating history book—officially, the genre is called narrative nonfiction—that is as riveting and compelling as the best novels. Highly recommended!
