Great Migrations, Great Stories, Great History?

There have been many great migrations in American history, not to mention global history. But for the last half century the term connects most readily to the twentieth-century relocation of African Americans from the farms of the South to the cities of the North and West. In the six decades following the outbreak of World War I, some six million black Southerners left that region, dramatically altering the nation's racial landscape. By the mid-1970s, nearly half of all African Americans lived outside the South. But the Great Migration was great less because of numbers than because of impact. The black Southerners who moved north and west transformed cities, rearranged political and racial systems, and, as a result, rebalanced the nation's regions, easing some of the distinctions between them.

Many historians have tackled this great subject, along with legions of demographers, sociologists, and economists. Not surprisingly, journalists have also taken up the topic. In 1991 Nicholas Lemann produced the best-known of these books, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How it Changed America.¹ Now a second journalist, Isabel Wilkerson, has answered with The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, putting forth a different perspective. Lehmann, concerned about the urban crisis of the 1980s, concluded that the Great Migration was a disappointment; Wilkerson sees it as a triumph of hope and new beginnings.

Journalists have different aims and methods than academic historians. They look for compelling stories and vivid personalities, preferring to build narratives around biographical subjects. That can be a challenge when the topic involves the experiences of multitudes. They also prefer to do their research through personal interviews rather than using materials, even oral histories, gathered by others. That too can be a challenge unless the history is quite recent.

Isabel Wilkerson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for journalism while with the New York Times, has written a gorgeous book that demonstrates the art of great writing and great storytelling. It is impossible not to admire the literary qualities of this near-best seller that has earned glowing reviews in newspaper after newspaper. As history, I have some reservations, mostly because of limitations that derive from the journalistic-historical method.

Years of research went into the book, including an extensive bibliography of works by historians and demographers along with an enormous number of personal interviews. Wilkerson talked with nearly 1,200 individuals before deciding to base her book on three people whose life stories give the book not just its spine but most of its bulk. This means that she focuses tightly on the personal dimensions of relocation, not on the great migration's impact on communities, politics, or culture.

The three individuals she has chosen represent some of the important class, gender, and geographic variations among migrants. Ida Mae Brandon grew up poor in rural Mississippi, married George Gladney at age sixteen and moved into a tiny sharecropper's cabin. For seven years, she and her husband worked in the cotton fields. She was pregnant with her third child when the family moved to Chicago in 1937, part of a Deep South to Upper Midwest stream of migrants. George Starling and his unhappy wife Inez began in Lake County, Florida, "a place of cocksure southern sheriffs, overworked pickers, root doctors, pool hustlers, bootleggers, jackleg preachers, barely a soul you could trust, and a color line as hard as Mississippi's" (p. 48). He graduated from high school, briefly attended college, and then joined his father and neighbors working in the orange groves. In 1944 he tried to organize a union and soon had to flee for his life, catching a train to New York, becoming part of the northbound exodus out of the southern Atlantic region. The son of school teachers, Robert Pershing Foster grew up in Monroe, Louisiana, attended Morehouse College in Atlanta and medical school in Nashville, after which he spent four...