![]() ![]() Using their own words, she provides firsthand accounts of what it meant to be born black in the deep south in the early 1900s: the abuse of women, the segregation, the lack of educational and employment opportunities, the impossibility of advancing oneself, the lynchings, the violence. Wilkerson invested hundreds of hours interviewing these three, as well as their family and community members. Three black southerners who made the decision of their lives and followed three main streams of the migration: Ida Mae Brandon Gladney was a sharecropper’s wife who left Mississippi for Chicago George Swanson Starling was a college student and citrus picker from Florida who headed to New York and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster was a surgeon who served in the United States Army and then drove across the desert from Louisiana to California. ![]() The book is an account of the true stories of three brave but typical migrants. The migration required great courage and had unforeseen consequences. ![]() Lasting from 1915 to 1970, it is the movement of 6 million blacks from America’s south to America’s west and north to escape the Jim Crow caste system and harsh treatment and to improve their lives and futures. Many Americans (like I was prior to reading the book) are unaware of the Great Migration, the greatest untold story of the 20th Century. Author Isabel Wilkerson spent 15 years researching to write this historical epic, which follows three African Americans through the Great Migration. ![]()
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