I'm reading Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns and can't contain my amazement. The best analogy I can think of is, suppose The Civil War happened and aside from a few obscure scholarly papers and memoirs, nobody wrote much about it? It's no exaggeration to claim that the lack of any comprehensive history of the half century-long migration of Black Americans out of the Jim Crow South and into northern and sometimes west coast cities is an oversight on that same scale. Fortunately, Isabel Wilkerson's wonderful 622 page books goes a long way in filling that history gap.
And what a story! The horrors of life in the segregated south show up in story after story: lynchings advertised in newspapers attracting crowds of thousands, the debt servitude of black sharecroppers who were powerless to protest when the 'boss man's' calculations after harvest time always seemed to leave them deeper in the red than they were before planting, the highly educated African-Americans who couldn't get more than laborer jobs because of their color and on and on...It's a story that's not widely told because even in 2013 America, enough of the story's villains: southern white segregationists and their descendants are still with us, and still dedicated to promoting the fiction that "all that stuff happened a long time ago." This book tells a different and needed story.
Many, many people who are still alive and vital remember when southern black people's fortunes, careers and very existences depended on the whims of bigoted white people. A not-very-old person like me can remember seeing a billboard on the road into Fayetteville, North Carolina in 1975 featuring a mounted klansman on a rearing stallion, welcoming (white) visitors with the admonition, "fight integration and communism." My late mother could remember riding segregated buses in Louisiana during World War II. Jim Crow was brutal, shameful and very, very recent. Americans should never forget it, but first they must allow themselves to remember.
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