The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

I loved this book. On every level. It was a wonderful read, so well constructed and it flowed from start to finish so well that you almost cannot believe you have finished it. So soon? But the real worth is in the story if tells, which I really knew nothing about. The post World War I migrations of African Americans out of the South. They were searching for a better life, to escape the lynchings, the lack of opportunity, the poor education, and the subservient role in life.
The book chronicles the migration of some six million African Americans who left the South behind between World War I and the 1970s. Her extensive demographic and social-history research, thousands of interviews and select oral histories create a fresh, rich book. She spent more than a decade on the book and it shows. It is framed by the migration of three very different people in this revolutionary exodus out of Jim Crow segregation. Her principal characters are diverse. Mississippian Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, who moved from sharecropping to Chicago in 1937; George Swanson Starling, who left the citrus fields of Florida in the mid-1940s and landed in Harlem; and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, a doctor escaping small-town Louisiana for the glitter of Los Angeles in 1951.
Wilkerson's interviews were extended and personal. She walked the same streets the three had walked, read the same newspapers, shared their food. Accompanied by her parents (migrants themselves from the South to Washington, D.C.), she recreated a cross-country drive made by Foster, coming to understand what it had meant to travel when accommodations were scarce, and the roads unsafe.
In between the personal narratives, Wilkerson takes on stereotypes of this era of poor blacks who contributed little and strained cities' capacities. The myths she sweeps aside resemble those leveled at European immigrants who came in the late 19th century, at Asians who came later, and at Mexicans caught up in border wars now. Bravo. This is a must read for every American.