Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Warmth of Other Suns, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Migration and Freedom
History, Memory, and Identity
The Legacy of the Migration
The Economics of Racism
Love and Family
Decision, Consequence, and Regret
Summary
Analysis
Chickasaw County, Mississippi, 1970. The land where Ida Mae grew up still looks the same. After Mr. Edd Pearson’s death in 1945, a planter named Willie Jim takes over his cotton plantation and runs it with sharecropper labor until the mid-1960s. Otherwise, the remaining Black residents mostly work in factories. Like many places in the South, Chickasaw County strongly resists integration—for instance, the Supreme Court ordered the South to integrate schools in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, but Chickasaw County doesn’t do so until 1970. When it does, white families start sending their children to private schools.
Wilkerson uses the story of Ida Mae’s Chickasaw County plantation as a metaphor for the overall fate of the South’s agricultural economy. Remarkably, besides the introduction of new technologies and the departure of generations of migrants, little changed on Southern plantations between the 1870s and the 1960s. Most importantly, racial exploitation continued to be their economic foundation. Meanwhile, the county’s resistance to integration is an important point because it challenges the commonly held misconception that federal action immediately ended segregation once and for all.
Themes
Eustis, Florida, 1970. After Eustis finally integrates its schools in the 1960s, George Starling’s stepbrother, an assistant principal, raises an outcry by choosing to discipline a Black boy who gets in a fight with a white boy. Willis V. McCall personally comes after the Black student, but Black parents protest and stop him. McCall, the sheriff who shot two Black rape suspects in 1949, is still in office. Miraculously, one of the suspects survived and revealed that McCall shot them execution-style in the woods, not in self-defense. The governor pardoned this man, who then mysteriously dropped dead a year later, while visiting his family in McCall’s jurisdiction. McCall survives 49 misconduct investigations and doesn’t take down the Jim Crow “COLORED” signs until 1971. The next year, he finally loses reelection after kicking a Black man to death in his jail. (But he gets acquitted in court.)
In Eustis, as in Chickasaw County, many aspects of Jim Crow persist long after the federal government mandates integration. After all, the controversy surrounding George’s stepbrother shows that race remains the main factor animating Southern politics. Nevertheless, the Black parents managed to stop Sheriff McCall, which shows that the new laws did empower them to defend their rights. Still, McCall never faces any consequences for his three-decade reign of terror, which specifically shows that the legal system remains seriously biased against recognizing Black people’s equal rights. Indeed, many scholars would argue that this is still true today, as racial disparities in law and policing persist throughout the United States.
Themes
Monroe, Louisiana, Early 1970s. Robert Foster’s whole family has left Monroe. Even though his father educated every Black student in town for three decades, their family name is barely relevant there anymore. The city named its new Black high school after a rival family, which devastated Robert’s father. It did name a housing project after him, but Robert is ashamed to see the family name associated with poverty and crime. Robert only returns to Monroe for funerals. By the 1970s, the streets in his childhood neighborhood still haven’t been paved. He can enter establishments that used to be segregated, like an old diner, but the experience is totally underwhelming.
While Robert may be surprised to see how much stays the same in Monroe for generations, his family’s departure also shows how the Great Migration causes a brain drain in many Southern cities, as the most educated and ambitious people are the most likely to migrate. The new Black high school is certainly a plus for Monroe, but the circumstances around its construction show how the South’s longstanding inequality and lack of democracy fostered corruption. A politically connected teacher at Robert’s father’s school unseated him as principal, then convinced the governor to build a new one and name it after him.
Themes
Back in L.A., Robert and Alice have a chic anniversary dinner at the same restaurant every December 23. One year, he’s furious at the maître d’ for seating them in the back corner, and another year, for giving them a booth that makes Alice look taller than him. Every year, he has the florist create a specific bouquet for the table, and every year, he adds one more rose to represent one more year of marriage.
Even if it helped him succeed as a doctor and migrant, Robert’s extreme perfectionism also makes him a very difficult customer and husband. But his anniversary ritual with Alice shows that they manage to make their marriage succeed by striking a reasonable balance between their opposed personalities and tastes.
Themes
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