Ida Mae Brandon Gladney was a sharecropper’s wife who moved from Mississippi to Chicago. The traditional migrant advantage has worked historically for Americans of all colors. It is no surprise, therefore, to find census data showing that Black Americans who left the South had far more schooling than those who stayed, and that Black migrants had higher employment numbers and more stable family lives than Northern-born Black people, as shown by lower divorce rates and fewer children born outside of marriage. Today, these black migrants appear as a modern version of the Europeans who flooded America’s shores in the late 1800s and early 1900s, both groups determined to roll the dice for a better future. In The Warmth of Other Suns, author Isabel Wilkerson moves between the stories of three individuals-Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Pershing Foster-discussing the historical background, statistics, and ultimate social influences the Great Migration had on the South and on the Northern ports of refuge that received nearly six million African-American migrants.
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