The Fleeing of Jim Crow
Today, in the New York Times, book critic Janet Maslin calls Isabel Wlkerson’s new nonfiction book—“The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration”—”a landmark piece of nonfiction.”
That kind of praise is hard to come by in the NYT.
The New Yorker weighed in, too, suggesting the author became “something of a one-woman W.P.A. project” while researching her book.
Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former Chicago bureau chief for The New York Times, documents the 55-year-long migration of black Americans across the United States.
Writes NYT critic Maslin (bold is MW’s): “Ms. Wilkerson makes a case that people who left the South only to create hometown-based communities in new places are more like refugees than migrants: more closely tied to their old friends and families, more apt to form tight expatriate groups, more enduringly attached to the areas they left behind. She argues that these people, among them her Georgia-born mother and Virginia-born father who raised Ms. Wilkerson in Washington, D.C., were better educated and more closely tied to their families than other scholars have assumed. She works on a grand, panoramic scale but also on a very intimate one, since this work of living history boils down to the tenderly told stories of three rural Southerners who immigrated to big cities from their hometowns.”
photo (top)/Farm Bureau Administration
