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
Los Angeles, 1996. Robert Joseph Pershing Foster is enjoying his retirement to the fullest in his showy mansion. A wealthy Hollywood physician, he’s always happy to tell his story.
Like with her other subjects, Wilkerson starts with Robert at the end of his life, enjoying the fruits of his decision to migrate. But, as a wealthy professional, he clearly belongs to a much higher socioeconomic class than Ida Mae and George. Needless to say, his story will reflect a very different side of the Great Migration.
Themes
Monroe, Louisiana, 1933. Pershing Foster lives on the poor Black side of town. His parents are teachers who supplement their income—a fraction of white teachers’—by selling milk from their cow. Pershing has big shoes to fill: his two older brothers are already a medical student and a star college baseball pitcher. But after he tries and fails to milk the cow and play the piano, his parents give up and let him do what he really wants: to dress up and go to the Paramount Theater on the prim white side of town. He has to enter through the “colored” door and sit in the dingy “colored” seats, which smell like urine. But he loves the movies so much that he scarcely cares.
As a child, Robert Foster goes by his middle name, Pershing. If George’s childhood was marginally better than Ida Mae’s, then Pershing’s childhood is marginally better than George’s. His parents are educated and well-respected, but they’re still relatively poor, and they still desperately hope that their children’s lives will be better than their own. For Pershing, the segregated theater represents both the promise of a better, more interesting life (in a place like Hollywood) and the obstacles that the South presents to him achieving such a life.
Themes
Pershing Foster’s parents graduated college and got married in New Orleans before moving to Monroe, a peaceful but brutally segregated town on the other side of the state. Pershing’s father is the school principal, a prominent community leader, and a part-time preacher at the local Baptist church. In fact, Pershing’s father eventually takes over the church, but half of the congregation wants the old preacher to stay and starts a brawl, which turns into a gunfight and leaves multiple people dead. The church shuts down. Meanwhile, Pershing’s mother is a serious, sophisticated New Orleans woman who throws grand parties and seems to know all the Black people in town.
Pershing’s parents are highly influential in their local community, but they run into serious obstacles in their attempts to uplift that community. Rather than uniting to build greater power in their community, they and their peers end up fighting for a limited amount of power over the community. Their experience helps illustrate why even Black political leaders and professionals would choose to leave the South in the early 20th century: it can be incredibly difficult to effect change within oppressed communities when the political system refuses to recognize their rights at all, or to listen to them under any circumstances.
Themes
As the youngest child in an accomplished family, Pershing constantly tries and fails to impress his parents. In seventh grade, his mother is his teacher, and she is extra strict with him. Whenever his parents punish other boys at school, the boys get revenge by beating Pershing up later. And Pershing’s attempts at teenage rebellion don’t go far, since everyone in town knows his parents.
Pershing grew up in a peculiar situation: his family was very high-achieving but would never achieve full social acceptance because of Jim Crow. This helps explain his lifelong perfectionism and disdain for the South: leaving will offer him both the opportunity to get out from under his family’s shadow and the opportunity to build a successful career on a much more even playing field.
Themes
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Pershing starts understanding segregation in high school. The books at his school are the ones the local white high school throws away, and he can’t get science books because he isn’t allowed at the whites-only public library. He sees the city building a luxurious new high school for white students, while his parents earn barely 40 percent as much as white teachers. Such deep pay disparities, compounded over generations, have contributed to the vast wealth gap between white and Black families. Pershing wants a better life: he resents segregation and the way it has limited his opportunities.
Pershing’s attitude about segregation is rooted in a deep recognition that he and his peers are just as worthy as their white counterparts, even as the government deliberately diverts resources away from them and towards white people instead. Thus, whereas Ida Mae and George understand Jim Crow primarily in terms of the violence that the white population inflicts on Black people, Pershing also recognizes the underlying structural factors behind segregation—which is really a mechanism to maintain the social structure created under slavery, through which white people continue to benefit at Black people’s expense.
Themes
One day, when Pershing is 14, a white man stops him in the street and asks him for “a nice, clean colored girl.” Pershing knows he has to be careful—in a nearby town, a white mob recently dynamited and burned down the courthouse to kill a Black suspect who was trapped inside. Still, Pershing is furious, and he replies, “You get your mama for me, and I’ll get you one.” Then, he runs off, knowing he could be lynched for what he said.
Pershing’s reaction to the white man represents his feelings about Jim Crow in general. Needless to say, it’s perfectly understandable to be incensed about a racial caste system that gives white people absolute rights over Black people’s lives, labor, and bodies. Indeed, the fact that Pershing risks facing retaliation for this reaction only underlines how brutal the Jim Crow system is. Under this system, it’s perfectly acceptable for a white man to sexually abuse a young Black woman, but it’s effectively a crime—punishable by death—for a Black man to point it out.
Themes
The South, 1915 to the 1970s. During major holidays, Black migrants return to their hometowns in the South. They show off their money, visit their old churches, and tell their relatives about the North, where there’s no segregation or Jim Crow. For instance, a woman named Francie Elie returns home to Mississippi from Ohio and tells her little brothers, Gilbert and Percy, about her new life. A few years later, Gilbert and Percy hear a disturbing noise from the woods behind their house—it’s a white mob beating a Black man to death. Then, a group of white boys attacks Gilbert, and Gilbert hits them back. His father apologizes profusely to the white boys and punishes Gilbert, who follows his sister to Ohio soon thereafter.
Migration is not a simple flow of people that moves in just one direction, from the South to the North. Rather, it involves a constant flow of people, money, and information back and forth between the North and the South. Gilbert and Percy Elie’s story exemplifies this process: most migrants choose to move to the North because of a complex mix of “pull” factors (the promise of a better life elsewhere) and “push” factors (acute problems at home that encourage people to leave). All of Wilkerson’s protagonists will follow this same formula, as they face mounting difficulties at home and receive increasingly promising information about their prospects elsewhere. Of course, Pershing could have faced the same dangers as Gilbert Elie after talking back to the white man—but even though he survived the confrontation unscathed, the threat of similar violence would continue to hang over his head.
Themes
Similarly, when Beulah DeBreaux returns from New York to visit her family in North Carolina, her sister Virginia decides to follow her. When Wilkerson’s uncle learns that his white boss belongs to the Ku Klux Klan, he immediately leaves Georgia and moves to Detroit. Ida Mae’s siblings tell her about Toledo and Milwaukee. George’s friends tell him about New York. And Pershing meets Mantan Moreland, the most famous Black man from Monroe, who is working in Hollywood. These connections inspire all three of the protagonists to migrate, too.
When talking about the Great Migration, it’s easy to wrongly assume that people made migration decisions in a vacuum, by objectively weighing the costs and benefits of moving. But this is far from the truth: as the stories of Beulah DeBreaux, Wilkerson’s uncle, and this book’s protagonists show, family connections, rumors, and migrants’ emotions and aspirations were all crucial pieces in the puzzle. None of them had perfect information about the places they were going to—after all, they had none of the digital technology that makes it easy to learn about faraway places today. And yet all of them made the decision to migrate anyway, out of a combination of drive, trust, and faith.
Themes
