"And in doing so he ran up against that caste system in which it was not considered appropriate for people of his caste to do that," Wilkerson says. He began agitating for higher wages and better conditions. He got a job in Florida as a citrus picker, but got into trouble when he spoke out about how he and his co-workers were being mistreated. It was a place of "cocksure Southern sheriffs, overworked pickers, root doctors, pool hustlers, bootleggers, jackleg preachers."Īlthough he was an outstanding student, Starling had to leave school to find work. Starling came from "the featureless way station of citrus groves and one-star motels" between Georgia and Orlando, Fla., Wilkerson says. The story of George Swanson Starling, another character in Wilkerson’s book, is quite different. "It took them decades really to get situated before they were able to afford to buy a home on the south side of Chicago," Wilkerson says. George ended up hauling ice up four and five flights of stairs in the cold-water flats of Chicago, and Ida Mae did odd domestic jobs before she finally found work as a hospital aide. They didn't have the skills to find work in the city. When Ida Mae and her husband George got to Chicago, they found it tough to get settled.
"Her husband went home to her and said, 'This is the last crop that we're making,' and they left for the north," Wilkerson tells NPR's Guy Raz. But the main reason the Gladneys left was because a cousin was beaten nearly to death over a theft that he had not committed. The wife of a sharecropper was not happy picking cotton, Wilkerson says. Ida Mae Gladney left Mississippi for Chicago in 1937. All began their lives under the Jim Crow laws of the South and made a decision to search for a better life in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. In The Warmth of Other Suns, Wilkerson tells the stories of Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Starling and Robert Foster. That "Great Migration" is the subject of a new book by Isabel Wilkerson, former Chicago bureau chief for the New York Times. In their search for work, education and opportunity, they changed the culture of the nation. In the middle of the 20th century, more than 6 million African Americans left behind everything they knew in the South and headed to the North, Midwest and West Coast. It is a migration unmatched in American history. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration
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