Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a sharecropper's wife, fled Mississippi in fear for her life after a relative was falsely accused of turkey stealing, and landed in Chicago in 1937.
George Swanson Starling, a Florida citrus picker who was threatened with a lynching after trying to organize fellow pickers, ended up in Harlem in 1945.
Dr. Robert Joseph Pershing Foster headed west to Los Angeles from Monroe, La., in 1953, frustrated that he was not permitted in most operating rooms in the South, despite his success as an Army surgeon.
This trio of protagonists formed the foundation of Isabel Wilkerson's extraordinary accomplishment, "The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration," winner of the Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize for nonfiction. The book's power resides not only in its intimate portraits, but also in its epic sweep, redolent of a great novel.
Read more in the Chicago Tribune.
Learn more about tonight's event.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Isabel Wilkerson Tonight at Page Hall 11/15 8PM
Monday, November 14, 2011
Isabel Wilkerson to Speak Evening Tuesday at Page, Afternoon Seminar Cancelled
Isabel Wilkerson, Pulitzer-winning Journalist
November 15 (Tuesday) {NOTE: Due to a scheduling conflict, Isabel Wilkerson’s afternoon seminar has been cancelled. She will be appearing at 8 p.m. in Page Hall, only.]
Reading — 8:00 p.m., Page Hall, 135 Western Avenue, Downtown Campus
Isabel Wilkerson, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is the author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (2010), a sweeping history of the movement of Blacks from the former slave states to the cities of the industrial North during the first half of the twentieth century. Writing in the New Yorker, Jill Lepore called it, “[A] deeply affecting, finely crafted and heroic book.” It received the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction. In 1994, Wilkerson became the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for journalism for her 1993 coverage of floods in the Midwest. Cosponsored by the Times Union.
Isabel Wilkerson: Stuck in an Albany Snowstorm
Isabel Wilkerson (who visits Tuesday 11/15) talks with Paul Grondahl in the TU:
"Isabel Wilkerson's introduction to winter in Albany was one she would rather forget.
She was a 25-year-old reporter at The New York Times, assigned to cover the state Legislature during the 1986 session. She drove upstate and parked her Honda Civic near her apartment, across from Washington Park, as a snowstorm approached.
She emerged the next morning to find the car half-buried in a snowbank churned up by a city plow. Lacking a snow shovel to dig out, she started gunning the engine. Tires spun, squealed and smoked. She rapidly shifted the automatic transmission from forward to reverse, and back again. The engine started making terrible noises.
"I blew out the transmission," she recalled with a groan. "I was totally unprepared for an Albany winter."
Read more in Paul Grondahl's profile in Friday's Times Union.
Friday, November 11, 2011
Albany, the Promised Land
"The Albany that migrants discovered upon arrival from the Deep South was a city on the move. The 1930 census placed the state capital's population at 127,412, with 98 percent white and 86 percent native born.... New arrivals found housing in Albany's oldest neighborhoods along the river. These neighborhoods were composed of row houses broken into apartments and shops. Once fashionable, these areas became worn after generations of newcomers to Albany getting their start and then with success moving on to better quarters and neighborhoods."
In connection with Isabel Wilkerson's visit to the Writers Institute on Nov. 15, it's interesting to read about the impact of the experiences of African Americans who came to Albany during the Great Migration. Jennifer Lemak, UAlbany graduate and Curator of History at the New York State Museum, has published some fascinating information on this period in the city's history
Read about the historic African American community on Rapp Road in the Pine Bush here.
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
History Repeats Itself, Isabel Wilkerson
During the spring floods of 2011, the New York Times reprinted some of Isabel Wilkerson's Pulitzer-winning 1993 coverage of Midwestern floods. In winning the award, Wilkerson (who visits Tuesday 11/15) became the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer in journalism.
"The floods have made the broad, S-curved Mississippi and its otherwise perfectly ordered valley look more like the Florida Keys . ... The river, ecologists and farmers say, was never supposed to follow the tight course humans have expected it to, indeed ordered it to, with their walls of dirt and concrete levees." More.