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, Late September-Early October 1937. Addie B., Ida Mae’s neighbor on the Pearson plantation, awakens to find that her turkeys have disappeared. Late that night, Edd Pearson brings a group of heavily armed white men to Ida Mae’s cabin to look for Joe Lee, George Gladney’s cousin and a notorious thief. Unbeknownst to Ida Mae, who has been sleeping, Joe Lee is hiding out in the kitchen. The white men take him away. But Ida Mae and George still don’t know why.
Even though Edd Pearson is generally about as honest and humane as plantation owners get, he’s still willing to use extrajudicial mob violence—the classic tactic of Southern white supremacy—to enforce his power. Indeed, Pearson’s nonchalance about kidnapping Joe Lee again shows how utterly normal this kind of violence was in the South, and how deeply white Southerners were invested in perpetuating it. After all, for centuries, the Southern legal system was designed by and for slaveholders, for the exclusive purpose of protecting their power—and the Jim Crow system was designed to keep this arrangement the same, to whatever extent possible.
Themes
Eustis, Florida, December 1941. After the U.S. enters World War II, the Army rejects George Starling over heart problems. But he learns that there are plenty of factory jobs up in Detroit, where he’d earn several times what he’s making now. Inez wants to quit her job as a maid and go to beauty school in Tampa, so George is saving for her tuition by working weekends, selling insurance and using his car as a taxi. Inez resents that she almost never sees George, but by 1943, he’s nearly saved enough for her school. He decides to earn the rest by spending the summer working in Detroit—but the neighbors spread rumors that he’s actually going to D.C. to be with another woman. Inez is bitter when he leaves.
Just like World War I, World War II opens opportunities for Black Americans by increasing their power as workers. George’s summer in Detroit shows that migrants didn’t always make a single, definitive decision to leave the South. Unlike Ida Mae, but similar to Robert (Pershing), George lived in many different places and went back and forth between the North and South several times before finally choosing to settle in New York. Despite his rocky marriage and conflicts with his neighbors, his financial wisdom promises to help him secure a stable, middle-class life for his family.
Themes
In Detroit, George works in a cargo plane factory. His job is dangerous: he works with highly flammable chemicals and his paranoid managers are on the hunt for Communist spies. In late June, an enormous week-long riot breaks out between the city’s white and Black communities, but George tries to ignore it and keep going to work, as usual. But on Monday, a mob attacks the trolley he takes to work, and on Tuesday, he has to outrun the mob to get back to his apartment. That night, he watches the National Guard send tanks down his street while his neighbors loot nearby stores. Many of his coworkers get killed and arrested.
George’s new job might pay better than picking fruit in Florida, but it’s not much safer or more dignified. The riots show how the Great Migration produces a serious racist backlash: white Northerners worry that Black migrants will threaten their own precarious economic status, so they try to drive them out of town, and the migrants respond with violence, too. Just as in the South, the government and police back white mobs, not Black ones.
Themes
George decides to quit his job, leave Detroit, and go home to Florida, where he spends the rest of the summer picking citrus. But now, all the able-bodied men have gone off to war or factory jobs, so the only people left to work in the groves are women, children, and the elderly. George is one of the strongest pickers now, and after his summer in the North, he can’t stand it when white people demand deference from him. He organizes the pickers and negotiates a significant raise—from 15 cents per box of oranges to 22 cents. With their savings, Inez goes to beauty school, and George and Inez rent a house of their own and buy all new furniture—in cash.
George cuts short his sojourn in Detroit, but his time there wasn’t a complete failure. It still shows him that he can take control of his own future and seek better opportunities by leaving the South. At home in Florida, he benefits from labor market effects similar to those he experienced in the North: there are fewer workers, so they have more power and can demand better wages. George’s education and financial literacy help him win better conditions for himself and his colleagues.
Themes
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Atlanta, 1941. Pershing Foster marries Alice Clement shortly after she graduates college in 1941. Their elaborate wedding is “the social event of the season” for the Black elite. After they marry, Pershing goes to medical school in Nashville. Alice spends a year at Juilliard in New York, then returns to Atlanta to teach. They have two daughters in 1943 and 1945. After medical school, Pershing’s residency takes him to St. Louis, North Carolina, and New York, but his mother dies of cancer before he finishes.
By marrying Alice and going to medical school, Pershing fulfills his dream of becoming a respected professional, joining the Black elite, and forging a pathway out of the segregated South. However, circumstances force him and Alice apart, which also prevents him from taking an active role in raising his daughters. Similarly, his mother dies before he can impress her with his achievements. In other words, the education and migration that promise Pershing a better future also cut him off from his family, the very people he hopes to help by improving his future.
Themes
Pershing’s brother Madison is the only Black doctor in Monroe. He spends most of his time treating patients in the backwoods because he’s not even allowed inside the hospital. By helping his brother out, Pershing quickly realizes that he doesn’t want to be a country doctor. But he also has many invaluable experiences. One day, he delivers a baby in a rural cabin without medical equipment and realizes that the mother knows far more about childbirth than he does.
Madison’s career shows Pershing how restricted his life would be as a physician in the segregated South. It also highlights how seriously segregation affects Black Southerners’ quality of life. It not only cuts them off from the rest of society and limits their social and economic opportunities, but also prevents them from accessing reasonable medical care. This underlines how much better life gets for migrants as soon as they cross over into the North, where most basic services are available to them.
Themes
After residency, Pershing becomes a medical officer in Austria for the U.S. Army. For the first time, he and Alice get to live together with their daughters. Thousands of Black soldiers had helped liberate Europe in World War II, only to face violence and discrimination back at home. For instance, a white mob murdered Wilbur Little in Georgia for daring to wear his army uniform around town. But Pershing doesn’t escape Jim Crow in Europe. His commanding officer, a white man from Mississippi, doesn’t let him treat white women, and the other white doctors constantly overrule his judgment. But when he makes a crucial call that saves a white lieutenant’s wife from a C-section, the base warms up to him.
Like George Starling’s time in Detroit, Pershing’s time in Europe isn’t quite as liberating as he might have hoped. It shows him that he will still face flagrant racism even in technically integrated places. Yet it also encourages him to keep fighting for a better life by showing him that he has the power to take his life into his own hands. As Wilkerson points out, World War II therefore accelerated the Great Migration for two reasons: it created a labor shortage that drove further Black migration to the North, but it also exposed Black soldiers and their families to the prospect of a better life, free from racism.
Themes
Chickasaw County, Mississippi, Fall 1937. The white mob ties Joe Lee up in the woods, beats him bloody with a chain, and takes him to jail. But he never even stole Addie B.’s turkeys, which wander back home in the morning. George Gladney complains to Mr. Edd, but he has to be very careful not to offend him. George goes to the jail to get Joe Lee, who has barely survived, and then he decides it’s time to move north.
Joe Lee’s torturers face no consequences for their actions—after all, the government consistently supports white mobs who engage in violence (or it just looks the other way). Ida Mae and George are humiliated to have to deal with this system and are worried that something similar could happen to them or their children. Ultimately, while the overall desperation of sharecropping life may have primed George and Ida Mae to think about leaving Mississippi, the attack on Joe Lee is the acute stressor that makes them decide to do it once and for all.
Themes
Eustis, Florida, 1944. “Lil George’s roving union” makes waves in town. Babe and Reuben Blye, some of the only Black foremen, help George negotiate reasonable prices for each grove. Usually, they succeed, but occasionally, the packinghouses reject their offers and leave George stranded in the groves, dozens of miles from town. He knows that, as a Black man in the Jim Crow South, he could face far worse. The Florida police have started arresting Black men, assessing them huge fines for vagrancy (not working), and forcing them to work for weeks to pay off the fines. After Eustis’s local sheriff, Willis V. McCall, arrests a citrus picker and beats him unconscious, the picker’s whole family escapes to New York.
Like Pershing, George Starling takes matters into his own hands in order to fight the limitations that racism puts on him. But, like Ida Mae and George Gladney, he’s still in the South, so he still faces the very real threat of police and white mob violence. The Florida vagrancy law exemplifies the way that Southern governments use their power to get as close as they can to recreating the system of plantation slavery. Just like plantation owners can invent debts for their sharecroppers, the police essentially extort Black citizens into unfree labor by making failing to work a crime (but only for Black people). Willis V. McCall’s abuses further underline how the law authorized and enabled white supremacist violence, rather than preventing it.
Themes
One day, a tangerine grove owner threatens George when he insists on negotiating prices. The pickers are more and more worried every day. Soon, a young yard cleaner overhears a grove owner planning to lynch George and his partners, Sam and Mud. He tells George, who realizes that he has to leave Florida. George explains the news to his father.
George faces any Black Southerner’s worst nightmare: he learns that he will be lynched and knows that the law will do nothing to stop it. For Ida Mae and Pershing, leaving the South is a wise and well-planned decision, but for George, it appears to be the only safe option.
Themes
Fort Polk, Louisiana, Early 1953. Pershing stands out in the army, but when he’s discharged to Louisiana, he doesn’t know what to do. He can join his brother Madison in Monroe, but his mother is dead and his father is a pariah, having been pushed out of his job. He can join Alice’s family at the Clement mansion in Atlanta, but only at the price of his independence. He settles on California, where lots of people from Monroe have already gone, and where he’ll finally be treated like an equal. Alice agrees—he’ll go first, and she and the kids will follow him later.
Pershing has tasted local fame (in Monroe), power and luxury (in Atlanta), and freedom and adventure (in the military). The question of where to migrate is consequential but thrilling—unlike Ida Mae Gladney and George Starling, Pershing could truly move and set up a practice anywhere he wants. Still, the migration paths of his friends and his taste for glamor still deeply influence his decision.
Themes
America, 1915-1970. Like the millions of others who join the Great Migration, Ida Mae, George, and Pershing all leave the South for different personal reasons related to the violence of Jim Crow. Limited numbers of Black people had been migrating north for centuries, but the World War I labor crisis set off a much larger wave. Southern elites panicked about losing their workers: they passed laws to ban labor recruitment, confiscated northern newspapers, and even shut down trains and arrested migrants. But all of this only made people even more eager to leave. Southern businessmen and politicians even visited the North and begged former sharecroppers to move back. Virtually none did. Suddenly, labor was scarce in the South, too, and planters had to increase wages and improve conditions for those who stayed.
While Wilkerson emphasizes that every migration decision was independent and highly individual, she stresses two factors as key contributors to the Great Migration: violence and labor. The North promised migrants a better life in both respects: freedom from white terrorist violence and better economic opportunities. In the South, these were linked because white supremacist violence helped keep Black people as a pool of cheap, unskilled labor by preventing them from moving up socially or economically. This explains the seeming paradox of white Southerners protesting Black migrants’ departure: they may have hated and oppressed Black people, but they also needed them to keep the plantation economy running. Indeed, by reducing the surplus of Black laborers in the South, the Great Migration ultimately improved conditions for those who stayed, too.
Themes
