The Warmth of Other Suns Characters

Robert Foster’s mother, a strict, high-minded socialite from New Orleans, works alongside his father as a schoolteacher in Monroe. In fact, she’s Robert’s seventh grade teacher. Robert looks forward to impressing her by finishing medical school and succeeding as a doctor, but she dies of cancer before he graduates.

Eleanor is Ida Mae and George Gladney’s fourth child. Ida Mae is pregnant with Eleanor when she, George, James, and Velma migrate north—but she chooses to give birth in Mississippi. As an adult, Eleanor lives with Ida Mae in the family’s three-floor bungalow.

Velma is Ida Mae and George Gladney’s second daughter (after Elma, who dies as an infant). She is six years old when the family migrates north. She grows up in Chicago and becomes a teacher, but then she dies tragically in a car crash.

Dr. King, the renowned Black minister who led the civil rights movement, speaks in Ida Mae’s neighborhood in Chicago in 1966 and gets assassinated in Memphis in 1968 (which sparks protests and riots around the U.S.).

John Starling, George Starling’s grandfather, is a moody sharecropper who grew up in the Carolinas, allegedly murdered his abusive boss, and then moved to Florida.

Sonya is George and Inez’s daughter. To George’s dismay, she gets pregnant at age 13 on a trip to Eustis and then moves there permanently. She and George never have much of a relationship, and she dies very young in a car crash.

Theenia Brandon, whom everyone calls “Miss Theenie,” is Ida Mae’s mother. She is distraught when all of her children leave Mississippi for the North, but she passes her generosity and staid moral values on to them, and this helps them succeed in their new cities.

The author of The Warmth of Other Suns is an influential, Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist. She spent more than a decade researching and writing this book—her first—in an effort to show the public how the Great Migration transformed Black life in the U.S.

Addie B. is Ida Mae’s neighbor on the Pearson plantation in Mississippi in the 1930s. She falsely accuses Joe Lee of stealing her turkeys.

Barbara is Robert Foster’s live-in nurse at the end of his life in the 1990s.

William Beck is the prominent Black doctor and medical school professor who helps Robert Foster, his former student, settle into life in Los Angeles in the 1950s.

Irene is Ida Mae’s sister. She and her husband migrated from Mississippi to Wisconsin during World War I, then settled down in Milwaukee. She helps Ida Mae and George Gladney move north.

Pearl Clement is Alice Clement’s mother, Rufus Clement’s wife, and Robert Foster’s mother-in-law. After Rufus and Alice die, she moves in with Robert, but they can’t stand each other, so she eventually moves out.

Joseph Brandon is Ida Mae’s father. He dies during her childhood.