Fierce Grace Advocacy

I knew, peripherally, that African Americans had moved north and west after emancipation. I had some vague understanding that there was migration. But six million people? The scale of this movement was completely lost on me. Six million people—and somehow, this monumental migration was barely a footnote in my high school American History class.

I kept asking myself: How did I not know this? How did we spend weeks on westward expansion, on the Gold Rush, on the Dust Bowl migration—and not on this? The Great Migration reshaped every major American city. It changed the political landscape of this country. It was one of the largest internal movements of people in human history. And yet it was invisible in my education, just as it was largely invisible while it was happening.

That erasure feels particularly significant right now, in this political moment we’re living through.

Why This Book Now

We are living in a moment of weaponized historical amnesia, and it should terrify us because we’ve seen this playbook before.

Ron DeSantis has banned AP African American Studies in Florida schools. Republican-led states across the country have passed laws restricting how teachers can discuss racism and American history. The term “Critical Race Theory”—which most people wielding it can’t even define—has become a cudgel to prevent honest conversations about our past. Books are being removed from library shelves. Teachers are being threatened with job loss for teaching accurate history. Does this sound familiar? It should. This is exactly what happened in the Jim Crow South: controlling the narrative, controlling education, ensuring that the next generation doesn’t learn the full truth about systemic oppression.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump and the modern Republican party have built their entire political strategy on white identity politics, framing white Americans as victims of “reverse discrimination,” stoking fears about immigration and “replacement theory,” claiming that diversity initiatives are attacks on white people. This isn’t dog-whistle politics anymore—it’s a bullhorn. And it’s working. Trump won re-election by mobilizing white voters around the idea that they are under siege, that their country is being “taken away” from them.

Look at the policies and rhetoric, and tell me these don’t echo Jim Crow:

On Immigration: The same language that greeted Black migrants in Northern cities—”they’ll take our jobs,” “they’ll bring crime,” “they don’t belong here,” “they’ll change our neighborhoods”—is now directed at immigrants crossing the southern border. We have a president promising mass deportations, talking about “poisoning the blood of our country,” building walls, separating families. Just as Black Americans fleeing violence in the South were told they weren’t welcome in Northern cities, immigrants fleeing violence in Central and South America are told they aren’t welcome in America—even though many are seeking the exact same thing: safety and opportunity for their children.

On Voting Rights: In the same way that Jim Crow laws used poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses to disenfranchise Black voters, we’re now seeing voter ID laws, purging of voter rolls, reduction of early voting sites in minority neighborhoods, and gerrymandering designed to dilute the power of voters of color. Georgia’s SB 202 even made it illegal to give water to people waiting in line to vote. The mechanisms have changed, but the goal is identical: keep certain people from exercising their constitutional rights.

On Education: Just as the South maintained separate and deeply unequal schools, we’re watching the gutting of affirmative action programs, attacks on diversity initiatives in universities, and the defunding of public schools in favor of private school vouchers that benefit predominantly white, wealthy families. The Supreme Court’s dismantling of affirmative action in college admissions echoes the same logic that maintained segregated schools: the fiction that we’ve achieved equality and any consideration of race is therefore “discrimination.”

On Reproductive Rights: The overturning of Roe v. Wade disproportionately impacts women of color, who have less access to healthcare, less ability to travel to states where abortion remains legal, and who face higher maternal mortality rates. This isn’t incidental—it’s structural. The same states that had the harshest Jim Crow laws are now the states with the most restrictive abortion bans. Control over bodies, control over movement, control over futures.

On Criminal Justice: The prison industrial complex is the direct descendant of convict leasing and chain gangs. Black Americans are incarcerated at nearly five times the rate of white Americans. Police violence against Black communities continues, despite the visibility of cases like George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless others. The system that George Starling fled—where a Black man could be killed with impunity for organizing workers or looking at a white woman the wrong way—has evolved, but it hasn’t disappeared.

The Great Migration happened because Black Americans weren’t safe in the South. They left because they were terrorized, because they couldn’t vote, because they couldn’t get fair wages, because their children couldn’t get decent educations, because they could be lynched for any perceived transgression. They were fleeing a system designed to keep them subjugated.

And here’s what should frighten us: many of the policies being implemented right now are designed to do the same thing. To keep certain people from voting, from accessing education, from controlling their own bodies, from seeking safety. To maintain a hierarchy where some people are considered more American, more deserving, more human than others.

Wilkerson’s book isn’t just history. It’s a warning.

The Personal Parallel (and the Crucial Difference)

I need to be honest about why this book hit me so hard, and why I felt compelled to read it in the first place.

I’m white. I’m an immigrant. My family and I came to the United States from Russia in 1999 with two suitcases, knowing only “Hello” and “Thank you” in English. We had struggles—there’s no denying that. Starting over in a new country with nothing is difficult for anyone. But we also had something that Ida Mae Gladney, George Starling, and Robert Foster never had, despite being born in this country: we had whiteness.

My father had a fantastic job offer at a university. We’d moved between countries before—Russia to Germany, Germany to Russia—so we knew how to adapt to new cultures. English came naturally to me. Within a few months, the language barrier had disappeared. By the time I reached college, no one could tell I was born in another country. My accent was completely gone. I could blend in. I could become, for all intents and purposes, simply “American.”

This is privilege. This is what white privilege looks like in practice.

Now contrast that with the people in Wilkerson’s book. Ida Mae Gladney’s family had been in Mississippi for generations—far longer than my family had been anywhere in North America. George Starling was born in Florida. Robert Foster was born in Louisiana. They were American citizens. Many of their ancestors had been in this country longer than the ancestors of the white people who terrorized them. And yet they had to flee their birthplaces like refugees, had to escape in the middle of the night, had to leave behind everything they knew—not to come to America, but to find safety within America.

When Robert Foster drove from Louisiana to California in 1953, he couldn’t find a motel that would rent him a room. He was a doctor—an educated, accomplished physician—and he had to sleep in his car in the desert because of the color of his skin. When Ida Mae Gladney’s family bought a house in a middle-class Chicago neighborhood, the house across the street literally disappeared overnight, dismantled and moved because white neighbors didn’t want to live near Black people. When George Starling rode the rails as a porter between New York and Florida, he had to attach “colored” cars to the train once they crossed into the South—American citizens being segregated on American trains in their own country.

My family flew into California. We were welcomed. My father had a job lined up. I went to integrated schools where no one questioned my right to be there. I went to college. I went to law school. I naturalized in the middle of law school—about 15 years ago now—and it was a proud moment. I chose to become American. Ida Mae, George, and Robert were born American, and they had to fight for the right to be treated as such.

When I lost my Russian accent, I gained invisibility in the best possible way: I could move through the world without people making assumptions about me, without being seen as “other,” without my presence in a neighborhood causing white flight. When Ida Mae, George, and Robert moved north, they could never lose the thing that marked them as different. They could never blend in. They could never escape being seen as Black first, American second—if they were seen as American at all.

This is why I knew I needed to read this book. As someone pursuing a career in victim advocacy, as someone who calls this country home, I have a responsibility to understand the full history of the nation I chose to join. Not the sanitized version taught in high schools. Not the triumphant narrative of inevitable progress. The real history. The history of who was forced to flee, who was denied safety in their own homes, who had to migrate within their own country to find the freedoms that were supposed to be their birthright.

I am proud to be American. But being American means reckoning with the truth. It means acknowledging that this country gave my family opportunities it denied to millions of its own citizens. It means understanding that the “warmth of other suns”—that beautiful metaphor from Richard Wright’s poem about seeking a different world, a place where you might bloom—was something Black Americans had to search for within their own country’s borders.

What the Book Taught Me

Wilkerson structures “The Warmth of Other Suns” around three individuals, and this choice transforms what could have been an overwhelming recitation of statistics into something deeply human and unforgettable. Six million people is an abstraction. Ida Mae, George, and Robert are real.

Ida Mae Brandon Gladney left Mississippi in 1937 with her husband and children, fleeing sharecropping and the constant threat of violence. She took the midnight train north—literally in the dark of night, because leaving had to be done secretly. White landowners didn’t want to lose their cheap labor, and Black people who tried to leave could face violence or worse. Ida Mae arrived in Chicago and found work, first in factories, then in hospitals. It was hard work, blue-collar work, but it was her work. She and her husband never missed a day. They became homeowners. Their children went to integrated schools. One became a teacher.

What struck me most about Ida Mae was her quiet dignity and her certainty that leaving was the right choice. She lived until 2004—long enough to vote for Barack Obama when he ran for Illinois Senate. She never regretted leaving Mississippi. How could she? In Mississippi, she had no future. In Chicago, she built a life.

George Swanson Starling fled Florida in 1945, literally smuggled out because his life was in danger. He had organized fruit pickers to demand fair wages, and in the Jim Crow South, a Black man challenging the economic order was a Black man marked for death. George made it to Harlem and found work as a railroad porter, riding the rails between New York and Florida for 35 years. The cruel irony: he escaped the South but never really left it, traveling back and forth on those trains, watching the “colored” cars get attached as they crossed the border, serving both northern and southern passengers, straddling two worlds.

George was sharp, quick-tempered, and fought for civil rights even when it endangered his job. His family struggled. His marriage fell apart. But he was free—free to speak his mind, free to advocate for others, free from the constant terror of lynching. That freedom, imperfect as the North was, meant everything.

Robert Joseph Pershing Foster left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue medicine. He was already a trained surgeon, the son-in-law of a college president, an accomplished man. And he had no future in the South. No matter his education or skill, he couldn’t practice medicine freely in Louisiana. So he drove west to Los Angeles, and that drive—Wilkerson’s description of that drive—is seared into my memory.

Robert drove through the night and into the scorching desert. He was exhausted. He needed to sleep. And he couldn’t find a single motel that would rent him a room. Not one. He was a doctor, driving a nice car, dressed well, and every door was closed to him because he was Black. He had to keep driving, fighting exhaustion, because stopping on the side of the road wasn’t safe either. When he finally made it to California, he built a glittering career—he became Ray Charles’s personal physician, bought a grand home, threw lavish parties. He achieved material success beyond what most people dream of.

But he never forgot that drive. He never forgot what it felt like to be unwelcome in his own country.

These three people had different lives, different outcomes, different levels of material success. But they shared something fundamental: they all left because staying meant accepting a life of subjugation, terror, and lost potential. They all took an enormous risk, leaving everything familiar for the unknown. And they all believed, until the end of their lives, that leaving was the right choice—not because the North was perfect, but because they got to make their own choices. They got to decide where to live, where to work, how to raise their children.

That’s what the South had stolen from them: agency. The right to make decisions about their own lives.

And here’s what Wilkerson makes clear throughout the book: the North wasn’t the promised land. Ida Mae’s family faced housing discrimination—when they bought that house in a white neighborhood, the house across the street was literally dismantled overnight and moved away. George faced economic discrimination and watched his northern-born neighbors look down on southern migrants. Robert, despite his success, faced continued racism and struggled with insecurity and demons throughout his life.

The Great Migration wasn’t from slavery to freedom. It was from one form of oppression to another, slightly more survivable form. It was from Jim Crow segregation to de facto segregation. From legal terrorism to economic marginalization. From being denied the vote to being confined to certain neighborhoods with inflated rents. The North offered more opportunity, but it didn’t offer equality.

What moved me most about these three stories was the courage they represented. Imagine leaving everything you know—your family, your home, your community, the land your ancestors worked—for a place you’ve never been, where you might not be welcome, where you don’t know if you’ll find work or housing. Imagine doing this not as an adventure, but as a necessity. Because staying means your children have no future. Because staying might mean death.

My family left Russia with two suitcases. So did Ida Mae. But the worlds we walked into couldn’t have been more different.

Why This Matters for Advocacy

I’m pursuing certification as a victim advocate, and I’ve been deliberate about expanding my knowledge—reading about trauma, about survivors, about the systems that fail people and the systems that can help them. But reading “The Warmth of Other Suns” clarified something crucial for me: you cannot understand individual trauma without understanding systemic trauma. You cannot help survivors without understanding the structures that created their vulnerability in the first place.

The Great Migration is a story about victims—millions of them. Victims of terrorism, of economic exploitation, of a legal system designed to deny them basic rights. Victims who became survivors by fleeing. And what Wilkerson makes clear is that trauma doesn’t end when you escape the immediate danger. Ida Mae, George, and Robert carried the South with them. They carried the fear, the humiliation, the loss. Robert Foster’s drive through the desert, unable to find a place to sleep, wasn’t just an inconvenience—it was a trauma that shaped the rest of his life. George Starling’s constant travel back and forth between New York and Florida meant he could never fully leave the terror behind. Ida Mae’s quiet dignity was built on years of surviving a system designed to break her.

Trauma is cumulative. It’s intergenerational. The children and grandchildren of the Great Migration inherited something from their parents’ and grandparents’ experiences—resilience, yes, but also hypervigilance, mistrust of systems, the knowledge that safety is never guaranteed. As an advocate, I need to understand that when I’m working with someone, I’m not just working with their immediate crisis. I’m working with their history, their family’s history, their community’s history.

Understanding the Great Migration also teaches me about displacement. Whether someone is crossing a national border or a state line, displacement creates specific vulnerabilities. You lose your support network. You lose familiarity with local systems. You may lose your language, your cultural touchstones, the things that ground you. You’re navigating new systems—housing, employment, healthcare, legal systems—without a map. You’re vulnerable to exploitation because you’re desperate and don’t know your rights.

My family experienced some of this. But we also had resources: my father’s education, our whiteness, the fact that we were entering a system designed to assimilate people who looked like us. The Great Migration showed me what displacement looks like when the system is actively hostile to you. When landlords won’t rent to you. When employers pay you less. When police view you as a threat. When the “help” offered comes with judgment and strings attached.

As someone pursuing victim advocacy, I will work with people from all backgrounds—different races, different countries of origin, different trauma histories. Some will be immigrants like me. Some will be American-born but still treated as outsiders in their own country. Some will have family histories shaped by the Great Migration, by Jim Crow, by systemic racism that continues today. If I don’t understand that history—if I don’t understand how systems have failed certain communities for generations—I can’t be an effective advocate.

This is especially true now, in this political moment. When someone comes to me for help and they’re undocumented, I need to understand that their fear of deportation isn’t paranoia—it’s a rational response to current policy. When someone doesn’t trust the police, I need to understand why that mistrust is earned. When someone is reluctant to engage with government systems, I need to understand that those systems have historically harmed people who look like them.

Advocacy isn’t just about helping individuals navigate crises. It’s about understanding and challenging the systems that create those crises in the first place. The Great Migration happened because the system was designed to terrorize Black Americans. They fled, and the North created new systems to marginalize them. Those systems—housing discrimination, employment discrimination, over-policing, underfunded schools—still exist. They’ve evolved, but they haven’t disappeared.

Being an effective advocate means seeing those systems clearly. It means believing people when they tell you they’re not safe. It means understanding that their individual story is connected to a much larger story of systemic injustice. It means recognizing that my own story—my family’s relatively smooth integration into American society—is not the universal immigrant experience, and that the ease we experienced was built on privileges that others were and are denied.

Reading “The Warmth of Other Suns” didn’t just teach me history. It taught me humility. It taught me to listen more carefully. It taught me that the country I’m proud to be part of has a debt it hasn’t paid, and that my work as an advocate is part of reckoning with that debt.

Seeking the Stories That Were Hidden

I naturalized as an American citizen fifteen years ago, in the middle of law school. It was one of the proudest moments of my life. I chose this country. I chose to make it my home. And part of what that choice means—part of what citizenship requires—is understanding the full truth of what this country is and has been.

The Great Migration should have been taught in every American History class I ever took. It should be as familiar to Americans as the Gold Rush, as the Dust Bowl, as westward expansion. Six million people, six decades, a complete reshaping of American cities and American politics—how do you leave that out? How do you teach the Civil Rights Movement without teaching what led millions of Black Americans to flee the South in the first place? How do you teach about Northern cities without teaching about who built them, who moved there, why they came?

You leave it out on purpose. You leave it out because teaching the Great Migration means teaching Jim Crow. Teaching lynching. Teaching economic exploitation and legal terrorism. Teaching that Black Americans had to become refugees in their own country. Teaching that the North wasn’t a haven but another form of a cage. Teaching that systemic racism wasn’t a Southern problem—it was and is an American problem.

And right now, in 2024, there are powerful forces working to ensure that the next generation doesn’t learn this history either. Books are being banned. Curricula are being restricted. Teachers are being silenced. The same tactic that worked in the Jim Crow South—control the education, control the narrative—is being deployed across the country right now.

So here’s what I’m asking you, as someone on this journey of growth and learning with me: What else weren’t you taught? What other stories were left out of your education? And why?

Seek them out. Read the books that make you uncomfortable. Read the histories that weren’t included in your textbooks. Read the stories of people whose experiences are nothing like your own. Read about the Chinese Exclusion Act. Read about Japanese internment. Read about the forced removal of Indigenous peoples. Read about the Bracero Program. Read about redlining and blockbusting. Read about the Tulsa Race Massacre. Read about Wilmington 1898. Read about the history of immigration policy in this country and who was welcomed and who was turned away and why.

Ask yourself: Why wasn’t I taught this? Who benefits from my ignorance? What would change if more people knew these stories?

For me, reading “The Warmth of Other Suns” was transformative not just because of what I learned, but because of what it revealed about the gaps in my education—gaps that were not accidental. I was taught a version of American history that was incomplete, sanitized, designed to make me comfortable. I was taught about progress and triumph and American exceptionalism. I wasn’t taught about the millions of people who had to flee their homes to find basic safety and dignity.

I’m working to fill those gaps now because I believe it will make me a better advocate, a better citizen, and a better person. Because understanding the truth—the whole truth, not the comfortable version—is the only way forward. Because the people I hope to help deserve an advocate who sees them clearly, who understands where they’re coming from, who knows the history that shaped their present.

Isabel Wilkerson spent fifteen years researching and writing “The Warmth of Other Suns.” She interviewed over a thousand people. She gave us Ida Mae, George, and Robert—three lives rendered in full complexity, three stories that represent six million. She gave us a gift: a history that was hidden, now brought into the light.

The least we can do is read it. Learn from it. And ask ourselves what else we’ve been missing.

Because in a time when history is being actively erased, when books are being banned, when the teaching of accurate history is called “divisive” or “un-American,” seeking out the truth is an act of resistance. Learning the stories that were hidden is an act of citizenship. And using that knowledge to become better advocates, better neighbors, better humans—that’s how we honor the courage of Ida Mae, George, Robert, and the six million who made the journey north and west seeking the warmth of other suns.