Summary

During the years between 1915 and 1970, some six million black southerners left their homelands in the South to migrate to the northern and western states looking for a better life. The impact of this Great Migration changed America forever and its impact is still being felt to this day.

Author Isabel Wilkerson had found an old sepia snapshot of two young women who had reunited in Washington, D.C. after fleeing the South. One of those young women was Wilkerson’s mother who mused about what life would have been like had she not left. America would not have had Toni Morrison, B.B. King, Richard Wright and his groundbreaking novel Native Son. Historian James N. Gregory wrote that a comprehensive account of the Great Migration did not exist. Wilkerson wrote The Warmth of Other Suns to rectify that omission...