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The Economics of Racism
Themes and Colors
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.
American migration stories are often framed in individualistic terms, but the Great Migration was fundamentally a family affair. Family connections determined when, where, and how people migrated—in the era of the Great Migration, almost every Black American in the South had family in the North, and vice versa. So it’s only logical that, when Wilkerson’s protagonists choose to leave the South, they decide as families and for their families’ sake. On the one hand, migrating means leaving loved ones behind. In an era before digital communication, this meant not seeing one’s parents, siblings, and community for years or even decades. Yet on the other hand, such a decision was often essentially an expression of love. Migrants’ primary motivation was usually their desire to provide a better life for their families—and especially to give their children opportunities that they could never have in the Jim Crow South. In fact, Wilkerson points out that many of the most prominent Black leaders of the last century—from writers like Toni Morrison and musicians like John Coltrane to athletes like Jesse Owens and political icons like Michelle Obama—may have never had the resources to flourish if their audacious parents hadn’t joined the Great Migration. Indeed, by the end of their lives, Wilkerson’s protagonists care about nothing more than family: Ida Mae is the happiest of the three because she maintains a strong family network in Chicago, while Robert deeply regrets not playing a more active role in raising his daughters, and George is devastated to watch his family slowly collapse before his eyes. Thus, this book is both a testament to the power of family and a warning against taking family for granted. Through her portrait of the Great Migration, Wilkerson shows how love and sacrifices bind families together, and she suggests that these family ties are often people’s greatest resource, both practically and spiritually, in the universal human pursuit of happiness.
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Love and Family ThemeTracker
The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Love and Family appears in each chapter of The Warmth of Other Suns. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Love and Family Quotes in The Warmth of Other Suns
Below you will find the important quotes in The Warmth of Other Suns related to the theme of Love and Family.
Part Two: Robert Joseph Pershing Foster
Quotes
They and Ida Mae and George and Pershing and children all over the South were growing up, trying to comprehend the caste they were born into, adjusting or resisting, lying in bed at night and imagining a world that was different and free, and knowing it was out there because they had seen it in the casual airs, the haughtiness even, and the clothes and the stories of the people from the North. Now nothing around them made sense, and everything that happened to them imprinted itself into their psyches and loomed larger because they had glimpsed what was possible outside the bars of their own existence.
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Part Four: The Things They Left Behind
Quotes
Perhaps the greatest single act of family disruption and heartbreak among black Americans in the twentieth century was the result of the hard choices made by those on either side of the Great Migration.
Part Four: The Other Side of Jordan
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They waited for hours to see him. Many were people who back in Texas or Louisiana or Arkansas might have only rarely seen a physician, who were used to midwives and root doctors and home remedies they handed down and concocted for themselves. Here was a doctor who was as science-minded and proficient as any other but who didn’t make fun of their down-home superstitions and knew how to comfort them and translate modern medicine into a language they could understand.
Part Four: The Prodigals
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They had gone off to a new world but were still tied to the other. Over time, the language of geographic origin began to change; the ancestral home no longer the distant Africa of unknown forebears but the more immediate South of uncles and grandparents, where the culture they carried inside them was pure and familiar.
Part Five: Epilogue
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Ida Mae Gladney had the humblest trappings but was the richest of them all. She had lived the hardest life, been given the least education, seen the worst the South could hurl at her people, and did not let it break her. She lived longer in the North than in the South but never forsook her origins, never changed the person she was deep inside. […] She took the best of what she saw in the North and the South and interwove them in the way she saw fit. […] She lived in the moment, surrendered to whatever the day presented, and remained her true, original self. Her success was spiritual, perhaps the hardest of all to achieve. And because of that, she was the happiest and lived the longest of them all.
