In 1994, Isabel Wilkerson became the first black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism. She’s coming to Toledo on Wednesday, March 18, as part of the Authors! Authors! series at the McMaster Center in the Main Library downtown.
In addition to her award-winning work as Chicago Bureau Chief for The New York Times, Wilkerson has taught at Princeton, Emory and Boston Universities, and has spoken at more than 100 universities in the United States and in Europe.
She’s also the author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, which details The Great Migration and The Second Great Migration, when African-Americans moved out of the Southern U.S. to the Midwest, Northeast, and West between 1915 and 1970. This migration was one of the largest in American history, and one of the most underreported stories of the 20th century. Janet Maslin (Books of The Times) called the book “a landmark piece of nonfiction.”
Wilkerson interviewed more than 1,200 people, yielding a broad thematic story of both the famous and the unknown to recount this epic piece of American history, spanning over five decades. Three main stories guide the book, related by three rural Southerners who left their hometowns for big cities, each during a different decade. These continental migrants left their homes for differing reasons, but they all shared the desire to leave the unjust Jim Crow world in which they were raised. The main title of the book references a poem from Richard Wright’s Black Boy:
…I was taking a part of the South
To transplant in alien soil…
Respond to the warmth of other suns
And, perhaps, to bloom.
Wilkerson examines this heroic uprooting and movement toward a better future and how brave participants transformed their own lives despite an oppressive, sectarian nation. As she states in The Warmth of Other Suns:
“By their actions, they did not dream the American Dream, they willed it into being by a definition of their own choosing. They did not ask to be accepted but declared themselves the Americans that perhaps few others recognized but that they had always been deep within their hearts.”
$10/adults, $8/students. 7pm, Wednesday, March 18. Main Library, McMaster Center. Tickets are available at all library locations during normal business hours.