The story she tells is her own story too, for she is a daughter of the Migration herself. In a beautifully written work that steps beyond the social science analysis that has predominated to date, Wilkerson helps us to understand the life behind the statistics. The migration of 6 million black Americans from South to North over the half century from 1915 to 1970 is a fact so large that it is hard to hold all its aspects in mind: the effect on the region left behind, on the destination cities, on the migrants themselves, on their descendants, and finally upon the character of the American nation as a whole. The achievement of Isabel Wilkerson’s amazing The Warmth of Other Suns is to transmute sociology into memoir.
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