Isabel Wilkerson

Isabel Wilkerson Instagram – It was 15 years ago today that The Warmth of Other Suns came into the world — telling the story of the six million souls who fled the Jim Crow South, who crossed rivers and mountains to get to what they hoped would be freedom in the rest of the country, transforming American culture as we know it. 
It was a singular offering that cannot truly be repeated. It took 15 years of immersion to produce it, over 1,200 interviews, North, South, East and West, and sacrifices that I am still calculating. It was a karmic undertaking, given that those generations were up in years when I began, and now the vast majority are no longer with us. 
I started working on it 30 years ago, before Google and iPhones existed. I threw myself into the project with no guarantee of success, entering the lives of hundreds of informants as a complete stranger and ended up so close that I spoke at one of their funerals. It was the honor of a lifetime to bear witness to the survivors of the largest mass movement in American history, and, especially, to get to know Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling and Dr. Robert Joseph Pershing Foster.  
I am forever grateful to everyone who embraced this book and this quest to turn a footnote of history into the central chapter it deserved to be and one of the most inspiring stories in American history. 
Its legacy endures. Of the African-Americans who shaped 20th Century culture, many were either part of the Migration or descended from it — Malcolm X, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Aretha Franklin, Lorraine Hansberry, Diana Ross, Bill Russell, August Wilson, Prince, Tupac, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, so many more….
The Great Migration was a leaderless revolution, and nothing in this world could stop it. It is a testament to the power of human will, to the impact of a single decision, to the transformation that is possible when enough people of one mind act upon their intuition. 
Shortly after the book’s release, a man I knew only in passing got ahold of it. He pulled me aside one day to tell me this: “The most important readers of this book,” he said, “have not yet been born.”
My deepest, truest gratitude to every single one of you. | Posted on 07/Sep/2025 22:57:04