The Warmth Of Other Suns

Ida Mae Brandon Gladney was part of the early period of the Great Migration, which started when social and societal chaos gripped the South following the South’s defeat in the American Civil War (1861-1865). Institutionalized racism and culturally condoned white supremacist terrorism dominated the lives of African-Americans in threatening and terrifying ways long after the fighting ended. Prominent public figures embraced this kind of violence: “‘If it is necessary, every Negro in the state will be lynched,’ James K. Vardaman, the white supremacist candidate in the 1903 Mississippi governor’s race declared” (39). White institutions supported and emboldened racial hatred: “newspapers alerted readers to the time and place of an upcoming lynching” (39). Quickly, those in power codified white supremacist ideology as “Jim Crow” (41)—a system of laws used to segregate and disenfranchise African-Americans (41).

Chapter 4 paints a vivid picture of the oppression and bleak lives lived by African-Americans in the South during this time, and shows how these factors led to many blacks deciding that it would be much better to leave the South for the unknown than to stay and have to deal with the constant threat of physical and emotional violence.

Raised a generation after Ida Mae in Eustis, Florida, George Swanson Starling saw as a boy how his family’s sharecropping situation adversely affected them. Like many Black farmers forced into sharecropping arrangements, the Starlings suffered unfair and exploitative agreements with the owners of their land.

In the 1930s, it was “estimated that only a quarter to a third of the sharecroppers got an honest settlement, which did not in itself mean they got any money” (54). At the same time, Jim Crow laws emboldened states to build a legal framework for harassing, oppressing, and circumscribing the lives of Black residents. For example, Florida “took steps to begin imposing a formal caste system” (59) that would restrict the rights of African-Americans living in the state—a state that was home to some of “the most heinous acts of terrorism committed anywhere in the South” (62).

Despite this, Starling was a star student, made valedictorian at his high school, and finished his first year of college without failing any subject. However, his family’s financial situation prevented Starling from finishing his college education, which, coupled with his decision to marry quickly and rashly to spite his father, profoundly affected the rest of his life.

Unlike the book’s two other central figures, Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, part of the last generation of the Great Migration, came from an affluent Louisiana family. His father was a schoolteacher and his brother a medical doctor, which meant that Robert Joseph Pershing Foster had many benefits not afforded to the average African-American living in the Jim Crow South. Foster loved the romantic ideal of California, aspiring from an early age to leave his hometown and make a new life for himself in either Oakland or Los Angeles—two destinations that were magnets for those leaving the South, especially Louisiana.

Wilkerson describes the lives the book’s three main figures were living before they made the decision to leave their ancestral homes and families, focusing on the burden of being Black in the South and the indignities that the descendants of enslaved people often suffered . African-Americans did not take the decision to leave the South lightly, but it was the inevitable result of years and years of being treated as second-class citizens, constantly at the mercy of the whims of their white neighbors. The sharecropping system limited the amount of wealth Black farmers could amass and left them fully reliant on the white landowning class.

Ida Mae Brandon Gladney spent her teens and early adulthood working in the cotton fields and choosing between her many suitors. When she married George Gladney, she left work as a field hand to adeptly raise their children and manage their home—likely no easy task given the constant shortage of goods and money that plagued many African-American households.

Having married rashly and early, George Swanson Starling needed money, so he took work as a picker in the orange groves of Florida. However, he felt alienated from his fellow workers because he was more educated than the vast majority of them. His education enabled him to see the ways in which the white owners of the groves shortchanged those working for them. Starling slowly moved into a leadership position, explaining to the other pickers what fair payment for their labor should be. This activism was dangerous—Starling would eventually become a target for white landowners threatened by anyone agitating to destroy the status quo.

Coming from a family of means, in the fall of 1937 Robert Joseph Pershing Foster was able to enroll in Atlanta’s Morehouse College, an institution trying to pave a wave forward for the descendants of enslaved people: “whatever future there was for colored America, they believed themselves to be it” (117). Leaving the shadow of his older brother Leland, Foster courted Alice Clement, the daughter of Rufus Clement, the President of Atlanta University. Their eventual marriage set Foster up for lifelong competition with Alice’s father, a powerhouse in the Black community. 

As their titles indicate, these chapters focus on the last-straw moments for the three main figures.

Ida Mae Brandon Gladney’s cousin Joe Lee was falsely accused of stealing turkeys and subsequently nearly beaten to death. In the aftermath, she and her husband decided that they could no longer remain in the South, one accusation away from their white neighbors dealing physical harm and even death with impunity to anyone they wanted.

During WWII, after hearing rumors about labor shortages in Northern cities, George Swanson Starling moved to Detroit, against the wishes of his wife, to work in a factory that made B-29 cargo planes. During his time there, he experienced one of the many race riots that were the Northerners’ response to the large influx of African-Americans, whom whites saw as a threat to their jobs and way of life. Race riots like this one were a not-so-subtle indication that although African-Americans escaped one kind of persecution in the South, they faced racism and prejudice in the North. Fearing the effects of the riots, Starling left Detroit and returned to his orange picking job in Florida. In Eustis, he organized a makeshift labor union among the orange pickers, taking advantage of the growing labor shortage amid rising demand for fruit in the North. His labor activism made him a marked man; fear of reprisal forced him to leave the South again and settle in Harlem, New York. 

Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, now married with a daughter, became a surgeon in the Army during the Korean War, where he was commissioned a Captain and sent to Austria. He believed that there he would finally use his medical training, but when he encountered a colonel from Mississippi  in Austria, “Pershing found himself back in the South” (145). Although limited in his duties, Foster still managed to refine his skills as a doctor in Europe. Back in the United States, he faced a choice: His father-in-law wanted him to remain in the South, but Foster wanted to strike out on his own. Foster ultimately decided to take his chances in California, leaving his family behind.