The warmth of other suns : the epic story of America's great migration

This is a big scholarly work written in such a way that the reader can forget how much information is being transmitted. It was quite different from this author's other book, Caste_ The Origins of Our Discontents, which took a more impersonal approach to many of the same issues, more scholarly and less emotional in effect. The migration of millions of American Blacks over the middle decades of the twentieth century transformed both the Jim Crow states and the ones they moved to. It wasn't organized by any one person but came from the life choices of thousands of free Blacks facing lives often only a little better than under slavery when they heard about the opportunities available to them if only they could abandon the place of their birth. They took much of what they knew from the South to inform their new lives and those of their children. The racism of the North had rules they had to learn gradually because almost none of it was written down. They had to make new friends and avoid new enemies. And when they couldn't attain all they had dreamt about the disappointment could affect their personality the rest of their life. By learning about their struggles and the experience of many others, the reader gets to know them as well as any fictional character and feels what they felt over decades. By seeing how widely divergent their lives turned out to be one gets a sense of the variety in the millions of unique life journeys during the great migration.

I listened to this as an audiobook narrated by Robin Miles over twenty hours long. some of the passages about brutality were hard to hear and sounded as though they had come from centuries ago, not just decades. By the end I felt as though I gained a greater appreciation of my neighbors and their ancestors.