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
The North and West, 1915 to the 1970s. Migrants face “a headwind of resentment and suspicion” in the North. Their clothes, accents, and customs set them apart, and even social scientists view their culture as deficient and pathological. But this is wrong: scholars also know that the farther migrants travel, the more ambitious and educated they tend to be. Most migrants to the North come from Southern cities and towns, not from plantations, and they are better educated than the average Black Southerner. In fact, by the 1950s, they even have more education than white locals. And, compared to Black locals, migrants are more likely to be married, employed, and financially secure. Sociologists explain this “migrant advantage” by pointing out that the most resourceful, hardest-working people are the most likely to migrate, while less resilient migrants often return home.
Wilkerson hones in on the prejudices and stereotypes that limit migrants’ opportunities and social integration in the North. Many of them remain extremely common even today—such as the racist but commonly-repeated idea that Black urbanites are disproportionately poor because they brought a morally deficient culture with them from the South. (The reality, as Wilkerson will show, is that they are disproportionately poor because of factors like labor discrimination, government disinvestment in Black neighborhoods, and racist housing valuation policies, all multiplied over generations.) The research handily disproves these stereotypes and shows that, like migrants everywhere, the Great Migration’s participants were really unusually ambitious, educated, and successful.
Themes
Still, migrants face harmful stereotypes in the North. Teachers treat Southern schoolchildren as disabled because of their accents, seat them all in the front or back rows, or force them to do menial tasks. For instance, young J.C. Owens becomes Jesse Owens because his teacher misunderstands his accent. Later, he becomes the U.S.’s greatest track and field athlete, and he wins four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany. Even though neither Hitler nor President Roosevelt will shake his hand, he’s treated better in Germany than at home.
While stereotypes certainly hold migrants and their children back, Wilkerson offers Jesse Owens’s success as proof that facing discrimination in the North is still far less detrimental than suffering from segregation in the South. Owens likely never would have been able to develop his talents or compete internationally if he had stayed in the South. So life in the North is far from painless or perfect, but it’s still markedly better than life in the South.
Themes
Chicago, August 1938. Fearing that Northern doctors would strap her into a hospital bed, Ida Mae returns to Mississippi to give birth at home, with a midwife. In the meantime, George moves from Milwaukee to Chicago, where he finds work as an ice deliveryman and rents a tiny basement apartment in the dilapidated but vibrant Black neighborhood of Bronzeville. Ida Mae and the children join him in August. They try their best to avoid the neighborhood’s gangsters, gamblers, and vice.
Unlike Robert Foster, who chooses Los Angeles over Oakland simply because he likes it better, Ida Mae and George end up in Chicago simply because George finds work there. Put differently, their migration decisions are entirely economic, and like most other Black migrants, they’re fundamentally at the mercy of the labor market. After all, Ida Mae’s decision to give birth at home shows that, unlike George Starling and Robert Foster, she doesn’t feel freer, safer, or more comfortable in her new city than she does at home.
Themes
In some ways, life in Chicago is even more miserable than in Mississippi: families are packed into in one-room shacks, which are usually falling apart and often lack heat and running water. Nobody will rent to Black people outside Bronzeville, but as more and more migrants arrive, there is less and less space for them. And since they have no other option, they pay much higher rents than white families—for far inferior housing. Eventually, this “pattern of overcharging and underinvestment” creates ghetto neighborhoods in cities across the North.
Wilkerson emphasizes the connections between the history of “overcharging and underinvestment” in urban Black neighborhoods since the early 20th century and the often-impoverished character of these neighborhoods today. The root cause behind these conditions is discrimination: landlords prefer to hike up the rent for slum properties in the area than to integrate the housing market. This trend has continued unbroken for decades—and is still the norm today.
Themes
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After World War I, jobs and housing were insufficient to keep up with Black migration to Chicago. In 1919, after white boys drowned a Black teenager who swam too close to the white side of a beach, serious race riots broke out. For two weeks, white and Black city residents randomly attacked each other and burned down houses and businesses. Such riots are effectively the North’s version of lynching—most are started by “disaffected whites,” who are often from the rural South—just like the Black migrants they blame for their poor working conditions. The first such riot was in East St. Louis, Illinois in 1917, when white miners turned against Black strikebreakers. After the Chicago riots, even though the government made recommendations for improving race relations, the city only became more and more segregated.
Wilkerson compares race riots to lynching not only because they are both common forms of racist violence, but also because they serve the same specific function: they both use terror to try and prevent the Black population from seeking better wages, political rights, and living conditions. The city government’s report on the riots is significant not only because it gives a detailed portrait of what happened, but also because it shows that local governments fully understood the situation and were capable of addressing it—but chose not to. In other words, the report disproves the common but naïve assumption that racist policies in the past were merely “products of their time,” and that nobody stopped them simply because nobody knew any better. In reality, Chicago’s segregation was a deliberate policy decision.
Themes
New York, Summer 1945. George brings Inez to New York with him and offers to rent her a beauty shop for her business. But she takes up nursing instead, whether “to show her independence, to spite him, or both.” George starts partying during his free time to cope with his unhappy marriage. Like Ida Mae’s neighborhood of Bronzeville, Harlem is overcrowded, and its residents pay unfairly high rents—which they cover by throwing poker parties. George starts attending and then throwing his own parties with Babe Blye (now his upstairs tenant). But Babe keeps losing their money, and then George catches him cheating, so he shuts down their operation.
George’s impulsive decision to marry Inez as a young man continues to weigh on him. Meanwhile, his friendship with Babe Blye, one of the citrus foremen he used to work with in Florida, demonstrates how people like George manage to support one another and stay connected with home by rooting themselves in networks of fellow migrants. Finally, the poker parties show how the deliberate “pattern of overcharging and underinvestment” in neighborhoods like Bronzeville and Harlem by government and financial institutions has directly led to the rise of crime and vice in them.
Themes
Los Angeles, June 1953. Robert Foster decides to open his own private practice. He finds an office near the USC campus, and friends from Monroe help him furnish it and throw an open house. Then, Alice and their daughters join him. He finds an apartment near the office, but the landlord cancels at the last minute, so he rents a doctor friend’s apartment near the Becks instead. Still, he struggles to get patients. Some Black migrants from Monroe prefer white doctors, some hold onto old hometown grudges, and some simply envy his success. So he targets patients from New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Texas instead.
Robert finally takes the leap and starts working on his own. Like Ida Mae and George, he succeeds largely thanks to supportive networks of friends and acquaintances. And like George, he makes a living by working within the Migration itself. His patients trust him because he shares their migrant background and can cater to their specific needs and anxieties. After all, Ida Mae’s insistence on returning to Mississippi to give birth shows how migrants often found the medical system cold and hostile in the North and West—if Ida Mae had been able to see a fellow migrant doctor in Milwaukee, perhaps she would have felt comfortable giving birth there.
Themes
