Black History Month--Book Recommendation: Tuesday's Reflection

One of my reading commitments this year is to read more books about the experience of being Black in the United States, especially nonfiction. This commitment is the result of going on a Civil Rights Tour in Mississippi and Alabama this past fall. (See posts on November 13, 15 and 20, 2018 plus January 15, 2019)

The tour gave me the impetus to finally read a book that has been on my list almost since it was first published in 2011, but once I started reading it, I almost couldn't put it down. I found more and more excuses to ignore my daily To Do lists and read for longer and more frequent stretches of time. 

I highly recommend The Warmth of Other Suns, The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson. 

Yes, it is long (over 500 pages), but it is incredibly well-written, brilliantly researched, and profoundly moving. 

From 1915 to 1970 almost six-million Black citizens migrated from the South for northern and western cities, changing the face of America. Wilkerson interviewed over a thousand people in order to give life to this exodus, along with highlighting key data and records to uncover this dramatic history. Throughout the book she weaves the stories of three specific people: Ida Mae Brandon Gladney from Mississippi who migrated to first Milwaukee and then Chicago in 1937; George Swanson Starling from Florida who migrated to New York in the 40's; and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, a black physician who served in the military and migrated from Louisiana to California in the 50's. As readers, we are privileged to follow their stories up to their deaths, and I found it genuinely hard to let go of them as the book ended.

These are real people whose stories illustrate the unspeakable treatment and hardships they experienced that drove them to migrate in hopes of a better life. Life in the North was not easy however, and Wilkerson does not portray northern cities as being free of prejudice. No way! 

My parents were born in 1923. I was born in 1948. I graduated from college in 1970. This migration was an active economic and cultural force during those years, and I knew basically nothing about it. 

I live in a part of the country where many Scandinavians immigrated in the middle to late 1800's through the early 20th century, and often I hear descendants of those immigrants proudly tell stories of how hard their great-grandparents worked to establish themselves in this country--the hardships they endured, along perhaps with prejudice they experienced. Sometimes those conversations are offered in an empathic way towards current immigrants from other countries. But sometimes I get another impression. "If my ancestors could do it, why can't they?"  

Well, this book goes a long way to shed light on the difference. For one thing, Black Americans don't look like Swedish farmers and Norwegian shopkeepers. How obvious, when you think about it, and although there were not official Jim Crow laws in the North, Black Americans often were treated as if there were. 

Unlike all the other groups of people who have left their native countries to come to the United States to find a better life, Africans had no choice. They were kidnapped and forced totally against their will to become slaves. No, the Black Americans who migrated from the South to the North in the 20th century had not been slaves themselves. They had not been on the slave ships, but I keep thinking about the family history they had inherited. And the trauma. And the effects of that trauma, which, I think, our nation continues to experience today and, in fact, perpetuates. 

The book challenges a number of stereotypes we white people almost take for granted. Wilkerson, after studying the census and other records, enlightens us:
         * Migrants were better educated than those left behind 
            in the South
         * Compared to northern Blacks already there, the
            migrants were more likely to be married and remain
            married, more likely to raise their children in two-
            parent households and more likely to be employed. 
         * The migrants were less likely to be on welfare than their      
            Northern counterparts. 

February is Black History month--a perfect time to open to what we didn't know we didn't know.  

I close with the last paragraph from Wilkerson's book.

             Over the decades, perhaps the wrong questions have
             been asked about the Great Migration. Perhaps it is 
             not a question of whether the migrants brought good
             or ill to the cities they fled to or were pushed or pulled
             to their destinations, but a question of how they 
             summoned the courage to leave in the first place or
             how they found the will to press beyond the forces
             against them and the faith in a country that had
             rejected them for so long. By their actions, they did
             not dream the American Dream, they willed it into 
             being by a definition of their own choosing. They did
             not ask to be accepted but declared themselves the 
             Americans that perhaps few others recognized but that
             they had always been deep within their hearts. 

An Invitation
What meaning does Black History Month have for you and how will you commemorate it? I would love to know.