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
Western New Mexico, April 1953. Robert Foster drives through the endless, sweltering Arizona desert and passes Phoenix around nightfall. He’s tired, but he finds several motels. He’s thrilled to finally be treated as an equal—until one after another refuses him service. At the fourth, even after he gives a speech explaining his situation, the sympathetic proprietors reluctantly explain that the other motel owners would get angry if they rented to him. So he continues through the desert, exhausted and delirious. At a gas station, he breaks into tears to the kind owner—he thought he was escaping Jim Crow, but maybe he isn’t. The owner comforts him but admits that “Los Angeles ain’t the oasis you think it is.”
Robert’s experience at the Arizona hotels shatters his hope that he would achieve acceptance and equality as soon as he left the South. His doubt and disappointment are understandable: he realizes that the freedom he is seeking in California might be a mirage. Perhaps his experience in Austria was no anomaly, and racism truly is just as common outside the South. Still, his sympathetic chat with the gas station owner shows that his destination will still be better than where he started—in the South, all white people expect deference from him, but in the West, only a minority of them do.
Themes
Robert drives on, half-asleep. At a fork in the road, he decides to go to San Diego instead of Los Angeles, because it’s 35 miles closer. When the road starts winding through the mountains, he can barely tell where he’s going in the dark. He pulls over several times to take short naps. When he reaches the California state line and sees a sign announcing the dangers ahead, he starts wondering if his whole journey might have been a mistake. But he figures that it’s too late to turn back. He reaches San Diego around sunrise.
Robert’s route through the mountains underlines how truly dangerous his journey is. These dangers serve as a convenient metaphor for the risks of uprooting one’s life to migrate. Contemporary readers should note that the interstate highway system didn’t yet exist when Robert took his trip, so he’s driving on treacherous backroads. Notably, during her research for this book, Wilkerson retraced his route in an attempt to understand what it would have been like for him to drive it, sleep-deprived and alone, in the 1950s.
Themes
On the Illinois Central Railroad, October 1937. Ida Mae and her family barely notice when their train finally leaves the South and crosses into Illinois. The night looks no different, and there is no rush to integrate the train. Soon enough, they’re in Chicago.
Even though Ida Mae and her family understand the Illinois state line’s significance as the place where the free North begins, their destination—and the place where they will start to feel truly free—is Chicago.
Themes
On the Silver Meteor, Northern New Jersey, April 15, 1945. The train pulls into Penn Station in Newark, New Jersey. Surely, some of the passengers mishear “New York” and get off. But George Starling has been to New York before, and he knows to stay on.
George knows exactly where he’s going, so unlike Ida Mae—and the migrants who confuse “Newark” for “New York”—he knows exactly what awaits him and feels no doubts at all about his journey.
Themes
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San Diego County, April 1953. When Robert Foster reaches San Diego, he’s more relieved than amazed. He stops the first Black person he sees and asks for “a colored hotel.” The man is confused and says Robert can try any hotel, but Robert insists—he can’t stand to be rejected again. The man directs him to a nondescript boarding-house, and Robert is delighted to shower and rest. When he wakes up, he drives the 121 miles to Los Angeles and entertains himself by looking at the billboards on the way.
Robert arrives in San Diego so exhausted that, despite his burning desire to live free in an integrated state, his first instinct is to seek out segregated facilities. The other man’s response shows him that California is more hospitable than the South or Arizona, but he simply doesn’t want to face the hassle and disappointment of racism once again. He waits to exercise his new California freedom until the next morning.
Themes
The South, 1915-1975. Southern observers originally blamed the Great Migration on northern recruiters, publications like The Chicago Defender, and the boll weevil (a beetle that devastated cotton crops). But in reality, migrants were just making an informed decision to find better work and escape Jim Crow. And contrary to most predictions, Black migration to the North and West dramatically increased after World War I: from 555,000 in the 1910s to 903,000 in the 1920s. Migration fell back down to 480,000 in the 1930s due to the Great Depression, but then it shot up during and after World War II, reaching 1.6 million in the 1940s, 1.4 million in the 1950s, and 1 million in the 1960s. And these numbers are certainly an undercount: numerous migrants also avoided census takers, passed as white, or underreported their household size.
Wilkerson rejects Southern elites’ explanations for the Great Migration because they deny agency to migrants themselves. Recruiters, newspapers, and economic forces certainly contributed to the migration, but attributing it solely to these causes means treating Black Southerners as passive victims of circumstance, rather than active creators of their own destinies. Similarly, by providing an overarching timeline for the Great Migration, Wilkerson shows that no simple set of external causes can explain it. While it’s important to consider the changing historical conditions that contributed to people’s migration decisions, it’s also crucial to recognize that they were still fundamentally decisions. This timeline also helps explain why Wilkerson chooses to focus on three migrants from different time periods—Ida Mae from the 1930s, George from the 1940s, and Robert from the 1950s.
Themes
Migrants almost always remember the details of their trips north. And they generally migrate for similar reasons—even well into the 1960s, when white supremacists substantially step up their use of violence during the civil rights movement. For instance, a young man named Eddie Earvin leaves the Mississippi Delta in 1963. He has worked as a cotton and spinach picker since the age of five. One day, he cuts his finger and decides to go to the doctor—but his boss stops him on the road to town and holds him at gunpoint. He decides to leave Mississippi, so he spends half a year saving up for the $21 bus ticket to Chicago. For months, he repeatedly visits the bus station to figure out the schedule (which isn’t posted). He sneaks away with his family. But the whole bus ride, they’re too afraid to speak.
The trip north or west consistently stuck in migrants’ memories because it was the moment they permanently chose a new direction for their lives. As Wilkerson repeatedly puts it, leaving the South was both a way for migrants to achieve freedom and an expression of their very freedom. Meanwhile, Eddie Earvin’s story may shock many readers because his early life so closely resembles Ida Mae’s, even though he is thirty years younger. Indeed, he arguably faced an even greater threat of violence than she and George did. His experience shows how little the South changed—and how similar migrants’ experiences were—from the turn of the 20th century until the civil rights movement overturned many segregationist policies in the 1960s.
Themes
