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
Selma, Alabama, Early Winter 1916. The Great Migration starts during World War I, in response to labor shortages in the North. Its first documented participants are a few hundred Black families who leave Selma, Alabama for Chicago in the winter of 1915–1916. They are fleeing “the long and violent hangover after the Civil War,” in which the planter aristocracy has taken away their hard-won freedoms.
The Great Migration’s origins are fundamentally economic. Until World War I, Northern industry was entirely closed off to Black workers, but during the war, white industrialists saw these workers as their best option to keep turning a profit. This underlines the way that, throughout the 20th century, most Black people were at the mercy of economic forces outside their control. Still, this represented an improvement over centuries past, as Black people could still make crucial personal decisions about how to respond to these circumstances—such as whether or not to migrate.
Themes
Right after the Civil War, most formerly enslaved Black families stay on plantations to sharecrop. But the government protects their political rights for the first time, so some are also able to go to college, start businesses, and even get elected to office. Then, in the 1870s, this Reconstruction era ends. White supremacists take over state governments across the South and, slowly but surely, start revoking Black people’s rights. The 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision legalizes “separate but equal” accommodations—which are never actually equal.
Reconstruction is a crucial but often forgotten stage in the history of U.S. race relations. After all, most Americans likely don’t realize that Black Americans had more political rights in the 1860s than in the 1950s, when white supremacists took political control of the South, rolled back these rights, and set up a regime that resembled the slave states of years past. Above all, the history of Reconstruction underlines the fact that U.S. history is not an inevitable march toward equality, but rather the product of concrete political decisions.
Themes
White supremacists also enforce their political power through violence. Lynching becomes commonplace: white families throw huge parties while they torture, hang, and burn Black people alive, often for crimes as minor as allegedly insulting a white person. In 1915, the film Birth of a Nation causes a national racist panic. The Ku Klux Klan returns to the South, and white mobs riot and burn down Black neighborhoods and businesses.
Much like the history of Reconstruction, the gruesome details of lynching parties and white riots are often left out of ordinary conceptions of U.S. history today. To many, this history is simply too painful to acknowledge directly—but Wilkerson suggests that doing so is crucial to fully addressing the U.S.’s long legacy of white supremacist violence. Notably, lynching and white riots were not spontaneous acts of passion, but rather deliberate strategies designed to prevent the Black community from advancing—and depriving white landowners and businessmen of their cheap labor.
Themes
Southern states pass discriminatory laws to restrict Black people’s rights and enforce racial segregation. They are called Jim Crow laws, named after a popular blackface routine from the 1800s. Southern states segregate transportation, workplaces, and public spaces. White and Black people are cut off from one another, and race relations worsen. Black people see their rights gradually disappearing and their status steadily decreasing. Black leaders encourage their communities to stay in the South, but their followers begin slowly disappearing, moving north.
Jim Crow laws work hand-in-hand with white supremacist violence to sustain the racial caste system. This creates a dilemma for Black Southerners: to pursue a better life, should they stay or should they go? Is it easier to change the racial caste system by fighting it directly, or by leaving and living freely in the North? While it may seem like choosing to migrate means choosing oneself over one’s community, Wilkerson’s portrait of the Great Migration will show that the truth is far more complicated. In some cases, migrants do turn their backs on the South, but in many others, they leave the South precisely so that they can help their friends and family back home.
Themes
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Young Black people growing up in the early 1900s have less contact with white people and face far more virulent racism than their enslaved parents and grandparents ever did. Everything in the South is segregated, from restrooms and elevators to ambulances and post offices, even though building two sets of everything is far more expensive than just building one. Black people can’t use white facilities, pass white drivers on the road, or even disagree with white people’s ideas in conversation. If they break any of these rules, whether formal or unwritten, they often face severe violence. This is the environment in which Ida Mae, George, and Pershing grow up, and it explains why they—and millions more—choose to move north. Many of these migrants never even tell their children and grandchildren what they experienced.
In this chapter, Wilkerson has used history and social science to paint a general portrait of the Jim Crow South, on the scale of society as a whole. But here, by describing the average Black person’s experience, she transitions back into the personal perspective that dominates her book. Her goal is to put her readers in her protagonists’ shoes—after all, imagining life under Jim Crow is the best way to understand the dilemma that migrants faced and the difficult decisions that they made. In particular, Wilkerson wants readers to understand how overwhelming feelings of terror, hopelessness, and injustice deeply shaped her protagonists’ experiences and decisions to migrate. Put differently, migrants weren’t just seeking better wages or more political rights—they were also drawn by the feeling of liberation that they achieved by freeing themselves from Jim Crow.
Themes
