The Warmth of Other Suns Paper Assignment Racism and ethnic discrimination in the United States has been a major issue since the colonial and slave era. Legally endorsed racism inflicted a heavy burden on African Americans, and in 1865 about 4 million black slaves were freed. Nevertheless, America was still not free from racism, and discriminatory practices continued in the United States with the existence of Jim Crow laws especially in the Southern states. Because of the violence towards blacks and the low-paying jobs found in the South, blacks fled to the urban North and the West to find work. In her novel, “The Warmth of Other Suns,” Isabel Wilkerson tells the story of Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a sharecropper’s wife who leaves Mississippi for the North after a family member is 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 dreamed and motivates all who meet her.
The Great Migration was the quiet journey of some six million black southerners who left the Southern United States for the large cities in the North, Midwest, and West. It began during WWI and did not end until the 1970s, making it one of the largest and most impactful changes of the twentieth century. The Great Migration altered urban life in America, modifying the social and political order of every city it reached. It pushed the South to do away with an outdated social structure, and it drove the country towards the 1960s civil rights revolutions. The black southerners were drawn to the North by higher wages, along with their desire to escape the Jim Crow laws that were violently enforced in the South. According to Emmett J. Scott, “They left as thought they were fleeing some curse. They were willing to make almost any sacrifice to obtain a railroad ticket, and they left without the intention of staying”