Coalition READING ROOM: “The Warmth of Other Suns,” by Isabel Wilkerson

“New York Times bestseller and one of the five best books of the 21st century! *
National Book Critics Circle Award Winner * An Oprah Daily Best Nonfiction Book of the
Past Two Decades”

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.

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