1. The Warmth of Other Suns combines a sweeping historical
perspective with vivid intimate portraits of three individuals: Ida Mae
Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Pershing Foster. What is
the value of this dual focus, of shifting between the panoramic and the
close-up? In what ways are Ida Mae Gladney, George Starling, and Robert
Foster representative of the millions of other migrants who journeyed
from South to North?
2. In many ways The Warmth of Other Suns seeks to tell a new
story—about the Great Migration of southern blacks to the north—and to
set the record straight about the true significance of that migration.
What are the most surprising revelations in the book? What
misconceptions does Wilkerson dispel?
3. What were the major economic, social, and historical forces that
sparked the Great Migration? Why did blacks leave in such great numbers
from 1915 to 1970?
4. What were the most horrifying conditions of Jim Crow South? What
instances of racial terrorism stand out most strongly in the book? What
daily injustices and humiliations did blacks have to face there?
5. In what ways was the Great Migration of southern blacks similar to
other historical migrations? In what important ways was it unique?
6. After being viciously attacked by a mob in Cicero, a suburb of
Chicago, Martin Luther King, Jr. said: “I have seen many demonstrations
in the South, but I have never seen anything so hostile and so hateful
as I’ve seen here today” (p. 389). Why were northern working-class
whites so hostile to black migrants?
7. Wilkerson quotes Black Boy in which Richard Wright wrote, on
arriving in the North: “I had fled one insecurity and embraced another”
(p. 242). What unique challenges did black migrants face in the North?
How did these challenges affect the lives of Ida Mae Gladney, George
Starling, and Robert Foster?
8. Wilkerson points out that the three most influential figures in jazz
were all children of the Great Migration: Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk,
and John Coltrane. What would American culture look like today if the
Great Migration hadn’t happened?
9. What motivated Ida Mae Gladney, George Starling, and Robert Foster to
leave the South? What circumstances and inner drives prompted them to
undertake such a difficult and dangerous journey? What would likely have
been their fates if they had remained in the South? In what ways did
living in the North free them?
10. Near the end of the book, Wilkerson asks: “With all that grew out of
the mass movement of people, did the Great Migration achieve the aim of
those who willed it? Were the people who left the South—and their
families—better off for having done so? Was the loss of what they left
behind worth what confronted them in the anonymous cities they fled to?”
(p. 528). How does Wilkerson answer these questions?
11. How did the Great Migration change not only the North but also the
South? How did the South respond to the mass exodus of cheap black
labor?
12. In what ways are current attitudes toward Mexican Americans similar
to attitudes toward African Americans expressed by Northerners in The
Warmth of Other Suns? For example, the ways working-class
Northerners felt that Southern blacks were stealing their jobs.
13. At a neighborhood watch meeting in Chicago’s South Shore, Ida Mae
listens to a young state senator named Barack Obama. In what ways is
Obama’s presidency a indirect result of the Great Migration?
14. What is the value of Wilkerson basing her research primarily on
firsthand, eyewitness accounts, gathered through extensive interviews,
of this historical period?
15. Wilkerson writes of her three subjects that “Ida Mae Gladney had the
humblest trappings but was perhaps 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.... 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”
(p. 532). What attributes allowed Ida Mae Gladney to achieve this
happiness and longevity? In what sense might her life, and the lives of
George Starling and Robert Foster as well, serve as models for how to
persevere and overcome tremendous difficulties?