THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS
The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration
By Isabel Wilkerson
Illustrated. 622 pp. Random House
Published a couple of years ago, this epic recounting will form the basis of next year's Documentary Photography class.
NYT reviewer DAVID OSHINSKY (September 2, 2010) writes:
In the winter of 1916, as Americans read the news of unimaginable slaughter in a distant yet rapidly spreading European war, it was easy to overlook stories like the one in The Chicago Defender reporting that several black families in Selma, Ala., had left the South....(the author) Wilkerson follows the journey of three Southern blacks, each representing a different decade of the Great Migration as well as a different destination. It’s a shrewd storytelling device, because it allows her to highlight two issues often overlooked: first, that the exodus was a continuous phenomenon spanning six decades of American life; second, that it consisted of not one, but rather three geographical streams, the patterns determined by the train routes available to those bold enough to leave.
[Pradip Malde thanks Prof. Roger Vail of Cal. State Sacramento for suggesting this]
