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
Chicago, November 1940. It’s election day, and both parties have been campaigning hard in Chicago. Ida Mae has never voted before—in Mississippi, she couldn’t, so she never even paid attention to politics. But now, the Democrats—the party of segregation in the South but the New Deal in the North—are courting her vote. She doesn’t even know how to use the ballot, but a volunteer helps her. Eventually, Ida Mae becomes an election volunteer, too. By voting, she is “defying the very heart of the southern caste system.” That year, Chicago migrants help deliver President Roosevelt a third term.
Ida Mae is nearly thirty, but voting is an entirely foreign concept to her. This shows how brutally effective Jim Crow laws were at preventing Black people from exercising their voting rights or participating in politics in the South. Wilkerson tells the story of Ida Mae voting for the first time in Chicago in order to underline how simply crossing over to the North entirely transformed Black people’s rights and status in society. Migration enabled Black Southerners to participate in political life as full citizens for the first time since Reconstruction.
Themes
On the Silver Comet, Mid- to Late 1940s. On the 23-hour voyage from Birmingham, Alabama to New York, George Starling notices a man hiding out between the train cars. In fact, many migrants hop trains when they can’t afford the tickets. For instance, a young man named Johnson migrates from Louisiana to Los Angeles in 1931 by hopping freight trains with a group of friends. Patrolmen kick them off of several moving trains, and at one point, they have to beg for food and spend the night at a hobo camp. But they make it, and Johnson eventually becomes a successful accountant. When George notices people hopping his train, he tries to bring them food—and he never turns them in.
The freight hoppers demonstrate that there was another cohort of migrants even poorer than Ida Mae. Yet Johnson’s story affirms Wilkerson’s basic message: that migration can fundamentally transform people’s lives by giving them opportunities that simply were not available in the places where they started. Meanwhile, in his new job, George still makes decisions based on his strong social conscience: he recognizes that the train hoppers are seeking freedom and a better life in exactly the same way that he did, so he does what he can to help them out.
Themes
Los Angeles, Summer 1955. Robert starts performing surgeries out of a local hospital, where the white doctors constantly brag about their weekend trips to Las Vegas. Robert dreams of joining them, but Las Vegas hotels are white-only. Then, he learns that the city’s first Black casino executive, a man named Jimmy Gay, has been secretly getting reservations for Black visitors. Jimmy secures reservations at the new Riviera Hotel for Robert’s party of 13. But when they arrive, dressed to the nines, their reservation is gone. Fortunately, Jimmy Gay gets them rooms elsewhere, and Robert gets to live out his Las Vegas fantasy. He even impresses a white woman with his red satin-lined suit.
As Robert becomes more successful at work, he runs into new glass ceilings. Las Vegas promises him the thrill, freedom, and glamor that originally motivated him to come to California, but it also represents the segregation and racial hierarchies that he has always wanted to fight. He has never stopped believing that he deserves everything white people can have, and Jimmy Gay helps him turn this into a reality. So it’s little surprise that he so fondly remembers his first trip to the casinos. Again, this anecdote shows that informal segregation in the North and West is often (but not always) negotiable, but only for the right price.
Themes
Chicago, Early 1939. George and Ida Mae struggle to find work—they have few skills, and most jobs are limited to white immigrants. Eventually, George finds work on the assembly line at the vast Campbell Soup factory. It’s as monotonous as picking cotton, but it’s also indoors and stable. He avoids the racial conflicts that plague many Chicago factories, in which factory owners stop hiring Black workers after white workers refuse to work with them. (Other bosses use Black workers to break strikes, or as a threat to keep white workers’ wages low.) Most Black men are unskilled laborers or servants, while most white men have skilled desk jobs. The disparity is even worse for women. But Ida Mae still needs to find work—and cope with the unfathomably cold Chicago winter.
George and Ida Mae’s new lives are extremely difficult but still generally better than their earlier lives in Mississippi. The social dynamics of Chicago’s factories show how racism and capitalism reinforce one another. Namely, the market pits different groups of workers against one another (like white immigrants from Europe and Black migrants from the South) by making their success zero-sum. White immigrants feel that Black migrants’ gain is their loss, and vice-versa. This is particularly convenient for business owners because it prevents workers from banding together and demanding better wages and working conditions.
Themes
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New York, December 1951. George Starling receives disturbing news about Harry T. Moore, a man he once met while working as a substitute teacher in Eustis. Moore was the Florida NAACP’s intrepid head organizer. He spent his days driving around the state, recruiting members, investigating lynchings, and lobbying legislators. He also started a public campaign to fix the more than two-to-one pay disparity between Black and white teachers, and when he stopped in Eustis, George agreed to join him. But he couldn’t convince any of the Black teachers at his school to join the NAACP. It turned out that the county school board threatened the school’s principal, who reluctantly told the teachers not to sign up.
Wilkerson tells Harry T. Moore’s story for several reasons. First, it speaks to the violence of segregation and the dangers that activists faced before the organized civil rights movement emerged. (This had important consequences for the Great Migration: until the late 1950s, Black people had little hope of seeing conditions change in the South, which encouraged them to migrate.) Second, it gives important context to George Starling’s early life in Florida. And third, Harry T. Moore is a largely forgotten civil rights hero, and Wilkerson hopes to help revive his legacy.
Themes
Later, Harry T. Moore got involved in a major lynching case in Groveland, near Eustis. A jury sentenced two Black men to death, and one to life in prison, for raping a white woman. There was no evidence against these men, and they got a second trial thanks to lobbying by Moore and the NAACP. But on the eve of their trial, the county sheriff, Willis V. McCall, shot and killed them, claiming self-defense. Moore began publicly calling for an investigation into the sheriff. Then, the NAACP leadership replaced him due to a disagreement about strategy. A few days later, the KKK bombed his house, killing him and his wife. This is the news that George Starling receives. Nobody is charged for Moore’s death. He becomes one of the civil rights movement’s first martyrs.
Sheriff McCall’s blatant abuses of power and Harry T. Moore’s tragic fate are just more examples of how, beyond just enforcing segregation laws, the government also played a central role in perpetrating and supporting terrorist violence against Black Southerners. Indeed, Moore’s murder likely confirmed to George that he was right to leave Florida—the same thing could have just as easily happened to him. Thanks to a resurgence of interest in Harry T. Moore’s story, his murder case was reopened in 2005. The government identified four perpetrators, all long-dead Ku Klux Klan members.
Themes
Los Angeles, Mid- to Late 1950s. As Robert Foster’s reputation grows, his friends from Monroe finally start coming to see him. So do hospital workers like orderlies and nurses, who take a liking to him. Soon enough, patients are waiting several hours for their appointments, and Robert is practically living at work. He’s so charming and fashionable that people call him “the Jitterbug Doctor,” and he starts befriending and treating celebrities, beginning with Ray Charles. And he can finally afford to buy his family a new house. But he wants to avoid conflict—white people are rioting all over Los Angeles as Black people move into their neighborhoods. So Robert finds a beautiful mansion in an area where several prominent Black professionals already live, and he moves his family in.
Robert ultimately builds a thriving practice because of the precise traits that he once expected would hold him back: his Southern background and his infectious, relatable, folksy personality. In this sense, he achieves every migrant’s dream—by leaving the South, he frees himself from segregation and succeeds on his own terms. His elite class status may separate him from the majority of Los Angeles’s Black population, but there’s no question that he makes an important contribution to his community through his medical practice.
Themes
