Between World War I and the 1970s, six million African Americans migrated from the South to the North and West. A new book chronicles their stories. By Up to Date
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In The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson, drawing on archival materials and over 1,200 interviews, chronicles the stories of longing, loss and hope of people leaving one isolated land for the dream of a better life in more fertile soil.
Steve Kraske talks with Wilkerson about famous Americans who were products of the Great Migration, the similarities of this domestic migration to the immigration of foreigners to the U.S., and how the tide of the migration has turned back to the South in the past decades.
Additional Information:
Isabel Wilkerson Isabel Wilkerson won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for her reporting as Chicago bureau chief of The New York Times. The award made her the first black woman in the history of American journalism to win a Pulitzer Prize and the first African American to win for individual reporting. She won the George Polk Award for her coverage of the Midwest and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for her research into the Great Migration. She has lectured on narrative writing at the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University and has served as Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University and as the James M. Cox Jr. Professor of Journalism at Emory University. She is currently Professor of Journalism and Director of Narrative Nonfiction at Boston University. During the Great Migration, her parents journeyed from Georgia and southern Virginia to Washington, D.C., where she was born and reared. This is her first book.