...THE SUN SHINES BEST:

Some books make a big splash at the moment of publication, and then recede into the shelves of bookstores and libraries until such a time when their wisdom and analysis once again calls them forward. 

Isabel Wilkerson's 2010 book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, is one such book. Wilkerson's meticulously researched narrative about this nation's most "underreported story of the twentieth century" gives sorely needed context to the frustrations of black Americans that are so palpable today.

The Great Migration is the term given by historians to the vast movement of some six million Southern blacks to the North from roughly 1915 to 1970. It shares much in common with other waves of immigrants to the United States, with the significant caveat that this was a domestic migration, from one part of the country to another, and from rural to urban areas. The Great Migration's beginning date of 1915 reflects the Southern black response to the recruitment efforts of Northern industries desperate for workers to fill their increased wartime orders, which coincided with increasing Jim Crow segregation in the American South. 

These recruiters often worked in secret to avoid violent confrontations with white Southerners who did not want to lose their labor force and the caste-based system they had created. Most historians of the Great Migration focus on this early period, positing an end to it with the onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s, with its paucity of jobs. Census material released in the early 1990s reveals a different story: that the Great Migration continued unabated until 1970, when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 finally forced an end to Jim Crow segregation. 

"By then," Wilkerson notes, "nearly half of all black Americans--some 47 percent--would be living outside the South, compared to ten percent when the Migration began." This vast movement of people in search of economic opportunity and freedom to exercise the rights of citizenship changed almost every social, economic, and political aspect of the United States in the twentieth century. 

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