I haven’t been posting on every book I’ve read, but wow, this was a good one.

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson is a history of what she calls “America’s great migration” - the movement of African Americans from the south to northern, midwestern, and western urban areas between 1930 and 1970. She follows three primary characters through their journeys from the Jim Crow south to new jobs and lives in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

Wilkerson weaves together their stories with the bigger picture of a changing country, where racial discrimination stubbornly persisted (persists?) even in states where the Jim Crow laws didn’t exist.

Given the unrest in the country at present this was a timely read. It struck home more than history often does because its time frame was so close to the present. It’s easy for me to think of even the 1960s as an old, black-and-white time; each of the characters Wilkerson follows, though, live at least into the 1990s… which I remember well.

Our history in this country is short, and this book was a good reminder that the racial tension we have today isn’t far removed from a long history of racism and slavery. We have so much yet to learn.