Throughout her book, “Warmth of Other Sons,” Isabel Wilkerson discusses life during the time of the Great Migration. She uses the viewpoints of 3 different interviewees in order to stress the obstacles and burdens faced by many African Americans during the time period surrounding the Great Migration. Besides for the hardship of having to migrate from the places you’ve known all of your life to one which is unknown, these people were burdened with yet another obstacle, their race. Although they were human, they were treated as unequal due to the color of their skin.
Before the Great Migration, most African Americans lived in the Southern States, in extremely tough conditions. As the first excerpt mentions, they lived in a type of caste system, where they worked as slaves, sharecroppers and farmers. Furthermore, they were controlled by the Jim Crow laws, which would take every chance it got to execute and torture them. However, as much as they had to endure in the South, they were forced to face many challenges as they moved to the North as well. From the excerpts we can see that as blacks migrated to the north they were faced with many obstacles. Not only were they looked at as inferior to whites, but they faced many instances of racial discrimination as well. They were discriminated against when it came to the labor force and in many cases they were unable to get certain jobs due to the color of their skin. Furthermore, it was also prohibited for them to live in certain neighborhoods and to eat in certain restaurants.
What was so intriguing about these excerpts was the fact that you can see how much the world has changed in a short matter of time. Although it pains me to look back on the past and to notice all of the hardships African Americans had to endure, I gain a lot of pleasure knowing how much this country has progressed. In this day and age, not only African Americans, but the people of all races and nationalities are seen as equals. There is little to almost no discrimination in the workplace and everyone has the same opportunity as the person next to him. Race does not separate people and does not determine your fact. Instead, each and everyone of us have the opportunity to control our own destiny. As opposed to the time of the Great Migration, race does not control our futures, we do.
One sentence that really had a great impact on the way I viewed life was when Wilkerson wrote, “How did they get the courage to leave all they ever knew for a place they had never seen, the will to be more than the South said they had a right to be?” I found this sentence to be truly amazing because I couldn’t even bare to try and imagine what these people had to go through. Their lives had been dictated for them from the start. From when they were born they were being told how to live and what they could do. Now, they were deciding the type of life they wanted to live and were determined to attain that. Furthermore, to me the idea of moving out of the city and town you had lived all your life to go to a city you had only seen in a catalog is truly petrifying. I feel out of place when I’m in the next neighborhood and all of these people were able to travel across the country to a destination that was foreign to them. The conditions in the South must have been truly unbearable for them to embark on such a journey. In fact, Wilkerson describes them as fleeing from a “spell or high fever.”
What was so interesting about this reading was the fact that it was able to shed light on something that is overlooked. Everyone fails to recognize that the world wasn’t instantaneously transformed to the way it looks today. Different time periods were unlike one another and the world had to slowly evolve into what it is today. The migration of African Americans to Northern cities was first met with opposition and segregation, however, as time went on the people of different races began to accept one another and recognized that in order to maximize the well-being of society we much share beliefs and cultures. The one question I would have for Wilkerson would be, how was society able to change from how it looked back then to the way it is today?
