My Favorite Nonfiction Book Ever Reads Like a Powerful Novel

The sheer scale of the Great Migration can abstract this movement, which took place over many decades and across generations of Black Americans. Because it spanned such a great period of time, from the early 20th century up to the ’70s, finding a central focus is both necessary to understanding its story and fully appreciating the lasting impact the migration had on the country. Wilkerson accomplishes this feat by following the lives of three people: Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, and George Swanson Starling, from their early days in their Southern hometowns to their decisions to move North and West, into their lives in their newfound homes, and through the end of their days. I recite their names in my head like they’re old school friends I grew up with because their astounding, moving stories have become embedded so deeply in my psyche these people feel near to kin.

The book unites oral history, narrative from our three protagonists, and scholarly examinations of the migration to engage readers in the nuances and complexities of this piece of history, and to emphasize that these weren’t masses in motion but individuals and families fleeing oppression, lynchings, lawlessness, and thievery, and who, made powerless in every other way, saw freedom and the wresting of some control over their lives in a big move to the cold North. From the white Southerners whose industries wouldn’t have existed without the labor of Black people, even as they made the lives of those indispensable people absolute hell, to established Black Americans in the North rejecting Black Southerners crowding what few lodgings and jobs our own American caste system allowed for them, Wilkerson dives deep into the messy mixed feelings and consequences of the Great Migration.

I loved this book so much it made me want to re-read Black American fiction from this era through new eyes. The perspective it gave me on what happened then and what’s happening now is priceless, and I’ll never forget the minute and major details of the stories that brought history to life.