Isabel Wilkerson Instagram – I am overjoyed and frankly stunned that my firstborn book is now a teenager. The Warmth of Other Suns debuted 13 years ago today.
The Great Migration was rarely spoken of in classrooms or dinner tables or book clubs in this country before Warmth entered people’s hearts in 2010 and helped make this historic movement an everyday part of the mainstream.
In fact, in the years I spent I researching this book, I’d had a hard time getting people to relate to what I was talking about. Now, the Great Migration is part of curricula and embedded in how many Black families see themselves — with pride rather than shame over what their ancestors suffered under Jim Crow and how they escaped.
Since then, I’ve been overcome with joy that the book and its title have inspired artists in multiple genres to engage with the magnitude of this work of history: Two ballets — one in Memphis, one at the Kennedy Center; art exhibitions in Washington, Mississippi and Baltimore; the magnificent art of the brilliant collagist Bisa Butler, multiple songs and classical music compositions, including one performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York; a transcendent concert at Carnegie Hall, and the seminal breakout essay that Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote for The Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations,” about which he said that The Warmth of Other Suns was “the mother of the piece.”
Then last June, Warmth was entered into the historic record of the United States Supreme Court when Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson cited the book in her seminal dissent to the overturning of affirmative action.
There is no greater honor than to see your hard work and ideas take root and expand beyond their own shores. These are some of the glorious and wide-ranging ways that art can beget art, creativity can birth creativity, that history can invite further inquiry and introspection.
These are the beautiful artistic offspring inspired by the six million brave souls who dared to escape Jim Crow and by the book that brought their journeys to life. And Warmth is beamingly proud, grateful, and at one with them all.
#thewarmthofothersuns #isabelwilkerson | Posted on 06/Sep/2023 19:40:25
