Isabel Wilkerson's narrative history tells the Great Migration — the movement of nearly six million Black southerners to northern and western cities between about 1915 and 1970 — through three lives chosen from more than a thousand interviews. Ida Mae Gladney leaves sharecropping Mississippi in 1937 for Chicago and a quiet blue-collar life; George Starling flees Florida in 1945 after agitating for better pay for fruit pickers, and lands in Harlem; and Robert Foster leaves Louisiana in 1953 to build a glittering medical career in Los Angeles, becoming Ray Charles's personal physician. Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose own parents migrated, interweaves their journeys with the larger history of Jim Crow, labor, housing, and the cities the migrants remade. The title comes from Richard Wright's Black Boy. Fifteen years in the making, the book is now a standard account of a migration long treated as a footnote, and it won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction.
Author: Isabel Wilkerson · Original publisher: Random House (New York), 2010
