You talked to more than 1,000 people who made this journey. There was really very little that looked at the people themselves, why they did what they did, how they gathered the courage and the resources, whatever it took for them to leave the only place they’d ever known for a place they’d never seen, what propelled them, and how they adjusted to this new place. There were 6 million people who participated in this, and they each had a story: 6 million different reasons for leaving, 6 million different events, 6 million permutations of the outcome. But that was not the only story to be told. They looked mostly at the problems that occurred in the cities. was reserved, at first, for sociologists and demographers.Īnd what did those sociologists and demographers see? We’re thinking about that day’s story we’re not thinking about the kind of glacial movement. When it comes to journalism it’s a hard thing to grasp. It spanned the careers of multiple journalists. it went on so long – it would have been very difficult for any one institution to follow it from beginning to end. Carl Sandburg was a reporter, one of the early reporters of migration. I think as I matured as a writer and journalist I became aware that there really was no “ Grapes of Wrath” for this migration. In some way I’ve been writing this book all my life. from Virginia and Georgia to Washington D.C. I wrote this book because I essentially grew up with this phenomenon without recognizing it.
Wilkerson recently talked with Monitor Book editor Marjorie Kehe. Yet for Isabel Wilkerson, award-winning New York Times correspondent and the child of parents who participated in the "Great Migration," this huge population shift has remained perhaps "the biggest underreported story of the 20th century." She hopes that her new book, " The Warmth of Other Suns," will change that. This mass migration reshaped America's northern cities, forced change in the South, and helped to fuel the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
Between about 19, some 6 million blacks left the Jim Crow South and moved to cities in the north and west of the United States.
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