48 pages • 1 hour read
Isabel WilkersonThe Warmth Of Other Suns
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaPart 1, Chapters 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “In The Land of Our Forefathers”
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “Leaving”
The first chapter of The Warmth of Other Suns introduces the reader to the book’s three main characters. The chapter also hints at some of the reasons Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster left the South in search of better opportunities for themselves and their families in the cities of the American North and West.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary: “The Great Migration, 1915-1970”
Wilkerson underscores the scope of the Great Migration. It is a movement felt on a national scale and one experienced in the life of every Black family: “from the early years of the twentieth century, to well past its middle age, nearly every black family in the American South, which means nearly every black family in America, had a decision to make” (8). The combined effects of these millions of decisions led to a decades-long process shaped more by the accidents of geography and local circumstances than by planning and coordination:
[The Great Migration] would become perhaps the biggest underreported story of the twentieth century. It was vast. It was leaderless. It crept along so many thousands of currents over so long a stretch of time as to be difficult for the press to truly capture it while it was underway (9).
However, once it had occurred, the effect of the Great Migration was profound. It deeply affected and influenced what was to become modern American culture.
Part 1, Chapters 1-2 Analysis
The first chapters of The Warmth of Other Suns provide a blueprint for the book’s methodology: Wilkerson will punctuate its three main stories with historical background so that the reader might better understand The Great Migration. This combination of extremely detailed and minute biography and broad anecdotes gesturing at the Great Migration’s enormity set Wilkerson’s work apart from other historical accounts of this period. As she points out, “the large emotional truths, the patient retelling of people’s interior lives and motivations, that are the singular gift of the accounts in this book” (13).
The mixture of the personal with the large-scale also means that the book’s structure echoes its first major theme—that any account of the Great Migration cannot solely present it in abstract numerical terms, but must delve into the specifics that prompted each migrant to leave their place of origin for an uncertain future elsewhere.
