The Warmth Of Other Suns

If African-American families in the North tried to move into white neighborhoods, they faced racism and segregation. When the Clarks—a well-educated African-American family—attempted to move into the working class suburb of Cicero, Illinois, the idea sparked a “full-out riot” (374) in the area. Afterwards, members of the white rioting mob were exonerated; the only blame fell to “the people who […] should have never rented the apartment to the Clarks in the first place” (374). This officially sanctioned segregation to split neighborhoods along racial lines was common practice in the North—a practice the effects of which still predominate today. For example, while “blacks would make up more than eighty percent of the population of Detroit. Just across the Ford Expressway, the black population of Dearborn, the 2000 Census found, was one percent” (378). Such issues, however, because they were not as overt as those facing organizers in the South, were much harder to confront and fight against, and in many ways went overlooked by the national audience.  

Wilkerson intersperses the fight for civil rights with the experiences of the book’s three central figures. After successful marches in the South and after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. set his sights on dealing with the “indifference and exploitation” (386) African-Americans faced in the North. There, he encountered the “Northern Paradox” (387)—a situation in which “almost everybody is against discrimination in general, but, at the same time, almost everybody practices discrimination in his own personal affairs” (387). In Chicago, King met with some of the most virulent opposition he had ever experienced, remarking, “I have never seen anything so hostile and hateful” (389).

George Swanson Starling did his best to make sure that African-Americans travelling by rail realized that they no longer needed to suffer previous indignities. Surreptitiously, George told passengers that they no longer had to give up their seats once the train passed the Mason-Dixon line, but even this carried the dangerous possibility that Starling might be “advising passengers to defy the conductor’s orders” (391).

The three subjects of Wilkerson’s work dealt with the changing times in different ways. Ida Mae Brandon Gladney spoke of the “white flight” that affected many neighborhoods in Chicago: “one by one […] they sold their house and moved away” (397). The Gladneys’ young daughter became pregnant while visiting family in back in Eustis.

Robert Joseph Pershing Foster still competed against his father-in-law, who was successfully elected to the Atlanta Board of Education in 1953. Though Robert felt that his wife and daughter were growing distant from him, he remained constantly at work, needing to appear successful and beloved. After his father-in-law died in 1967 and his mother-in-law came to live with the Fosters in California, their home situation grew worse.

Wilkerson looks back at the results of the Great Migration from its point of conclusion, 1970, examining the overall effect that the migration had on those who took part in it, on Northern whites, and on other immigrant communities that co-mingled with the migrants. For Wilkerson, it is important to remember the “quiet successes of everyday people like Ida Mae” (415) because debates about the success or failure of the migration too often focus on “welfare and pathology” (415).

Wilkerson compares and contrasts the experience of European immigrants who arrived in Chicago and other Northern cities around the same time as migrants like Ida Mae and George Swanson Starling made their arrivals:

A major difference between the acceptance and thus life outcomes of black migrants from the South and their white immigrant counterparts was […] white immigrants and their descendants could escape the disadvantages of their station if they chose to, while that option did not hold for the vast majority of black migrants and their children (417).

The North “called for blacks to remain in their station” (417)—a reality that explains some of the difficulties facing the second generation of migrants, who did not fare as well as their parents although they had had the benefits and advantages of being brought up in the North. Wilkerson argues that “the presence of so many black migrants elevated the status of other immigrants in the North and West” (419), for they “unwittingly diverted anti-immigration antagonisms their way” (419).

Wilkerson sets off this image of black struggle with the story of a massive party Robert Joseph Pershing Foster threw, a gala event likened to “a state dinner” (424). A local newspaper that covered Black socialites of Los Angeles wrote up Foster’s well-known success and his party. However, even this recognition was not enough—as one of Robert’s guests and a life-long friend remarked, Robert “always sought approval […] And I never understood it because he had it all” (431). Foster’s unshakeable insecurity arguably reflected the status of African-Americans in the non-Southern United States: No matter what heights they reached, they worried that what they had could suddenly be snatched away from them.