The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel WilkersonMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is a moving and detailed study of the great internal migration of African-Americans from the Deep South from WW I through the '70s. This work is made all the more personal and affecting by biographies of specific and varied participants. This includes the plucky sharecropper’s wife Ida Mae Gladney who left Mississippi after a family member was nearly beaten to death over the disappearance of a white man’s turkeys. She and her family end up in Chicago where she sees things she never imagined including the banality of crime in a declined South Side.
Possibly the most detailed subject here - at least the one that stands out for me - is Robert Joseph Pershing Foster. This 1953 transplant to Los Angeles from Monroe, La. overcame prejudice in and out of the military to acquire the famous patient Ray Charles. Charles would record a song about Dr. Foster’s way of running off with Mr. Charles’s women. (Wilkerson misidentified the writer of the song about Foster. While the song, “Hide Nor Hair”, was recorded by Ray Charles, who also commissioned it and suggested its subject matter, it was written by Percy Mayfield.) This ambitious surgeon who sought to escape the caste system of the South performed surgery for the United States Army but was not permitted to do a simple tonsillectomy in his hometown hospital. He eventually rose to high society in Los Angeles and became a friend to Charles, but was tragically drawn in to gambling and other vices. Foster deserves a book of his own!
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