To understand her heritage as a product of the Great Migration, award-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson traveled throughout the United States and interviewed more than 1,000 people.
On Thursday, Wilkerson, a College of Communication journalism professor, explained the influence and inspiration behind her new book “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration,” a nonfiction narrative illustrating the nation’s largest exodus.
About 150 people gathered in the Photonics Center to hear Wilkerson share her experiences in an event entitled “Voices of the Great Migration: Isabel Wilkerson discusses ‘The Warmth of Other Suns’,” hosted by the College of Communication.
In the Great Migration, six million blacks from the South were transplanted to big cities in the North from World War I to the 1970s in what formed the historical backdrop of the United States, Wilkerson said.
“It was the greatest underreported story of the 21st century that wasn’t covered enough by journalists,” she said. “Of the 90 percent of people living in the South, half of them relocated to Chicago, Washington D.C., and even places in the West Coast.”
Wilkerson explained her nonfiction narrative recounts the true experiences of three migrants to the North in the 1900s, through which she gets a real look at the successes and failures different “streams” of migration afford.
“There were three streams of the Great Migration, each person representing the different journeys during different decades of the 20th century,” she said
A former New York Times reporter and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Wilkerson now serves as the director of the Narrative Nonfiction Program in COM.
Although the larger extent of her career has been dedicated to writing articles, she is familiar with more extensive writing, as evident by her award-winning pieces on the Midwest floods and a profile on a 10-year-old Chicago boy’s struggles, according to the COM website.
Wilkerson said she conducted about 1,200 interviews at numerous senior centers throughout the country in order to develop her book.
“They are the breath, depth and scope of the migration, total strangers who opened up about their lives and journeys,” she said.
Wilkerson’s nonfiction work also represents her own migration to understanding her own parents’ stories and the culture surrounding her while growing up in D.C., she said.
“My parents were from the South and both migrated to D.C. where they attended college and eventually got married,” she said. “I was surrounded by the manifestation of the Great Migration and no one ever talked about it. I wanted to understand the food and culture and people I was around.”
After 15 years of hard work and dedication, Wilkerson completed her “passion and labor of love,” which was published in September.
“I wouldn’t have taken it on if I knew it would take this long, but it was definitely worth it,” she said. “ I was choosing people organically and who had personality. It was a requirement that the people picked were driving the car, not a kid in the backseat.”
COM journalism professor Lou Ureneck said he was moved by Wilkerson’s narrative.
“I have a much better understanding of the daily fears, disappointments, and anxieties of living in that system and also a sense of the aspiration that took them out of it,” he said. “Each person who reads it, I think, will come to see the injustice of the old system of American apartheid. It is a book, in its own way, that teaches respect for all people. By serving as a role model, her life is a demonstration of commitment to the work of journalism at its highest level.”
Harvard University professor of African-American studies John Stauffer, who moderated the event, said Wilkerson’s book captures the Great Migration well.
“Most narrative writers, either journalists or fiction writers, they are either good in one area: good at writing lyrical sentences or very good at writing a chapter or book,” he said. “They are rarely good at doing both and Isabel’s ‘The Warmth of Other Suns’ is an intricately structured book and in my review, she does for the Great Migration like Steinbeck does for the Okies. In many respects, she is better than the level of a sentence.”
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