America’s Great Migration

Every so often a books comes along that reminds us of why narrative history matters. Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson has given us such a book in The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration. She gives us a deeply personal tale of one of the great underreported stories of the 20th century: the migration of African-Americans from the Jim Crow South to the cities of the North, West and Midwest. To understand this story is to finally come to grips with race, power, politics, religion and class in our contemporary society. My conversation with Isabel Wilkerson: var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www."); document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E")); try { var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-6296941-2"); pageTracker._trackPageview(); } catch(err) {}