More From Reading the Warmth of Other Suns in Community

Today The Gospel Coalition is running a response I wrote to The Warmth of Other Suns. Published in 2010, it is the epic story of America’s Great Migration—the movement of 6 million black Americans from the south to the north between 1915 and 1970. They migrated in pursuit of the freedom and equality due them since the Emancipation Proclamation. They migrated for better treatment, a better life, a better future for their children. 

This past summer when we as a nation were reeling from racialized deaths, violence, and protests, I invited others to read the book with me. The goal was to gain context and understanding—the history that led to the circumstances of 2020. I wrote about the book and reading it in community—both online and in real life—and shared those thoughts with TGC. But as you might guess, when responding to a 600-page epic, I had a lot to say. Far too much to say to be included in the TGC piece. 

Here, then, are a couple portions that my editor and I chose to omit, but I wanted to share here with my readers. They tell a fuller story than the one you’re likely to hear on the evening news. They enlighten the hearer who has ears to hear. 

Understanding What Ails Us: Chicago’s South Side is an Example 

The South Side of Chicago is a perfect example of understanding today’s ailments in light of yesterday’s conditions. Just a few pages into the book Wilkerson introduces us to Ida Mae Gladney sitting in her Chicago apartment in 1996, watching the mayhem below. She writes, “There they are, all scuffling beneath her: urban drug dealers, falling down sweatpants pooling at their feet, now bent over the driver’s-side window of a late model sedan from the suburbs; fourth-graders doing lookout for men who could be their fathers; young girls with their stomachs swelling already; middle-aged men living out of their Pontiacs; gangsters who might not make it to this weekend” (19). Ida Mae Gladney observes what we all know to be grievously true: the South Side of Chicago is one of America’s deadliest communities. 

Wilkerson shows us, at least in large part, why. We learn of an entire century that began with white families bombing newly arrived black families (58 bombings in just one neighborhood between 1917 and 1921), and bullets flying through windows in the homes of new black families (397). Within the span of 1967 alone, one neighborhood went from “all white to nearly totally black. . . . The turnover was sudden and complete and so destabilizing that it even extended to the stores on Seventy-fifth Street, to the neighborhood schools and to the street-sweeping and police patrols that could have kept up the quality of life. It was as if the city lost interest when the white people left” (396). 

By the end of the Great Migration most big cities in the north were hypersegregated (398) and black communities were forced to fend for themselves. Grocers, teachers, and the police simply left. 

Of course, the genesis of the South Side does not explain everything about the violence of today. But knowing a community was founded by the flight of the majority and the rejection of the minority is enlightening. The veil is pulled back and we begin to see that violence and mistreatment weren’t just a problem in the south. The north may not have had Jim Crow enshrined in law, but it was enshrined in attitudes. And this isn’t ancient history—we’re talking about neighborhoods forming when our grandparents were born—generations of black Americans growing up in communities despised and distanced by the culture at large. 

Read History Together to See Untold and Hidden Beauty 

If the Great Migration is the greatest underreported story of America’s 20th century, then the stability, health, and beauty of the migrating community is the greatest underreported sub-story. Throughout the 1900s politicians, scholars, and citizens blamed “the dysfunction of the inner cities on the migrants themselves. The migrants were cast as poor illiterates who imported out-of-wedlock births, joblessness, and welfare dependency wherever they went” (528). 

Newly available census records, though, tell a different story. In reality, black migrants from the south were just as educated as black Americans already residing in the north. They “were more likely to be married and remain married, more likely to raise their children in two-parent households, and more likely to be employed. . . . [They] managed to earn higher incomes . . . even though they were relegated to the lowest-paying positions. They were less likely to be on welfare” (528). 

Black migrants, having come from unspeakable injustice in the south were victoriously resilient in the north. Migrants and their children were the first black mayors in Cleveland, Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York and San Francisco (529). The migrants brought with them influence, tradition, and culture, forever shaping and enhancing American music, language, food, dance, dress, and politics. They raised black income levels and shaped a black middle class and a black electorate (531). They created colonies in the north from their villages in the south, importing recipes and religion and instilling their values in their children (536). 

And yet, we still silence the strength and dignity of black Americans beneath, for example, the violence we see streaming live from Chicago’s South Side. Chicago and every other city in the United States benefits from the grit and goodness of the African American community. But even in 2020 the broader American culture pays more attention to black violence and death, than black life, joy, and vibrancy. The Warmth of Other Suns gives pause and asks why. 

Why don’t we know and recite the good news coming from the black community? It’s there. It always has been. 

Untold and All-Too Recent Examples of Injustice 

From 1889 to 1929 a black person was hanged or burned alive every four days (39); a 1909 curfew required blacks in Alabama to be inside their homes by 10pm (41); as recently as 1947 there still existed 25 “slave markets” in New York City where black women gathered in the morning in the hopes of getting hired by white women to clean their homes for as little as 15 cents an hour (333); whites in Harlem banded together to try to keep the newly arrived black migrants out calling them a “growing menace,” an “invasion,” a “common enemy” (249); white parking spaces persisted in Mississippi into the 1950s (31); a bus station built in Florida in 1958 had two of everything to keep the races separate (44); and in 1966, following racialized riots in Chicago, Dr. Martin Luther King said, “I have seen many demonstrations in the South, but I have never seen anything so hostile and so hateful as I’ve seen here today.” 

Christian Privilege and Responsibility

It’s no trite sentimentality to say that we’re all brothers and sisters (Christians or not). We share a Maker and he cherishes every single one of us. May our shared origins and shared Creator and shared nation drive us to unify rather than divide. 

And in 2020, may the church—we who share an eternal and resurrection faith—bear witness to the supernatural and reconciling blood of Christ alone. 

“For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility.” Ephesians 2:14-16 

Author’s Note: You can see my original book review of The Warmth of Other Suns written in 2016 here.