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The Great Migration

November 11, 2011 By Wendell Collins

There are so many reasons to love Princeton , but as a book lover, there is perhaps no better place to be. Where else can one live down the street from the most prolific writer in America and also work alongside the best and brightest in literature, poetry, history, research and discovery?

We Princetonians (transplanted or born) can partake in hearing visiting writers on campus and in town, whether they are writers or scholars in residence at the University or just passing through. On more than one occasion said scholars have won Pulitzer Prizes after their time here.

One such recent visitor was Isabel Wilkerson, a New York Times writer and editor now teaching at Boston College, who spent a year of her research here for her excellent Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Warmth of Other Suns. I had the opportunity to hear her on campus last spring as she shared stories about the people she met and tales she heard as she wrote about the Great Migration of blacks from the violence of the South to an often unwelcoming North and West. Her own family had made such a migration, but she chose to focus on three very different people who ended up in very different places - a physician, a train porter, and a menial laborer -- but who experienced their own very real pain in leaving their homes and families and seeking a new life.

Wilkerson’s tale of three transplanted blacks from the South to California, New York and Chicago hit home with me in a way I had not expected. Over the years I have met plenty of folks who had fled to the north, a land of more opportunity yet still inequality and prejudice. But I had no idea of the rampant violence, racism and inequality faced by Wilkerson's characters, and so many still today.

Reading "Warmth," like all great nonfiction, made me think about things I had not thought of much -- what it must have been like to leave home, family, friends, and the known - even if the known was evil and dark and often ended in torturous death. I thought about how segregated our world still is.

I grew up in the South after spending my early childhood in New York City, where I had black and white friends and a charmed life near Central Park. But once we moved to North Carolina, I found myself in a somewhat privileged all-white environment in the midst of desegregation. I had experienced only a tip of the iceberg from the front of the bus – I was born in the early 60s, and remember seeing Dr. King on TV, and the funerals of John F and Bobby Kennedy. My family lived in the nice neighborhood on the good side of the tracks, and when schools were integrated, I was yanked from public school and put into private school, which I sneeringly called the snob school. That is, until I got there and benefited from a higher level of education and avoided the upheaval of a newly desegregated school system. The black kids across town wanted no more to do with us than we with them. After six years in private school, I switched back to the public high school, where tensions had started to ease and where I could make black friends once again.

Reflecting on my grandparents and parents and how they dealt with racism, I wondered, did they look the other way? Were they prejudiced? Yes and no. They were a product of their environment. But I remember speaking with a black man at my dad's funeral reception who praised my dad for crossing the racial barrier in South Carolina where he lived. It was a little thing in the grand scheme, but something.

I encourage anyone to read Warmth of Other Suns, whether you grew up in the South or not. While it brought me to another place and time, it also brought home both how far we have come and how far we have yet to go.