In this month’s LWD Book Club selection, The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson takes readers on a profound journey through the lives of three individuals who were part of the Great Migration, a mass movement of Black Americans from the South to the North and West in search of better opportunities and freedom from racial oppression.
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The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration
by: Isabel Wilkerson
In this beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson presents a definitive and dramatic account of one of the great untold stories of American history: the Great Migration of six million Black citizens who fled the South for the North and West in search of a better life, from World War I to 1970.
Wilkerson tells this interwoven story through the lives of three unforgettable protagonists: Ida Mae Gladney, a sharecropper’s wife, who in 1937 fled Mississippi for Chicago; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, and Robert Foster, a surgeon who left Louisiana in 1953 in hopes of making it in California.
Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous cross-country journeys by car and train and their new lives in colonies in the New World. The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an “unrecognized immigration” within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is a modern classic.
This month’s selection is in honor of Black History Month. For further suggested reading, here is a good list:
What to Read Next: Black History Month 2025
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WHAT ARE YOU READING LATELY?
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Other LWD Book Club Selections:
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Looking forward to this one!!
I started it and then things have been crazy the past week and a half. I’m going to have to recheck it from the library. In fact, I’m glad you reminded me…I’ll call right now.