The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson details three stories which exemplify those of the Great Migration, the mass exodus of black people from the South between 1915 and 1970. The Great Migration is hardly discussed in school, but this phenomenon would dwarf the California Gold Rush as well as the Dust Bowl Migration (loc 182), going on for far longer than initially expected. By the time the Great Migration ended in the 1970s, nearly half of all black Americans would be living outside the South, compared to ten percent when the Migration began (loc 193). The Great Migration ran along three main routes which emptied in the northeast, the midwest, and the west.
Across the South, someone was hanged or burned alive every four days between 1889 and 1929 (loc 663). Colored people had to be off the streets and out of city limits by 8:30pm in Palm Beach and Miami Beach.
Sharecropping was slavery. The workers never made any real money, relying on the planter to be truthful about debts and credits (loc 923).
In the past, I have made the clear cognitive connection between slavery and America's economy, but the author made the explicit connection that, each day, sharecroppers had to pick a hundred pounds of cotton for the clothes across the country and "closer to home..there were Klansmen needing their white cotton robes and hoods," (loc 1744).
Sheriff Willis McCall, tormentor and Sheriff of Lake County was a key figure in the Groveland Four and Devil in the Grove.
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