The Warmth of Other Suns summary

It was the summer of 1928 in Chickasaw County, Mississippi, and Ida Mae was becoming a young woman. She had always been a bit of a tomboy, but now, at 16, boys started taking notice of the petite, fearless farmer’s daughter. Soon, a quiet young man named George was coming by her house every Sunday, trying to win her hand in marriage.

The key message here is: Ida Mae and her family left their Mississippi farm for better wages and safety.

George Starling grew up on his father’s cotton and tobacco farm in Eustis, Florida. But he envisioned a different life for himself. He wanted to go to college – a pretty big dream for a Black child from the South in the 1930s. 

George was a great student, and after being one of the few kids to graduate from his all-Black high school, he got accepted to the Agricultural and Mechanical State College in Tallahassee. 

In 1930s Monroe, Louisiana, everybody knew the Foster family. 

Madison Foster was the principal of the local Black high school, and his wife, Ottie, was a long-time teacher there. Despite making less than half of what white teachers in the area earned, the Fosters were a high-minded and ambitious couple. They had already sent their oldest son, Madison, to medical school – a remarkable feat for a Black family in the South – and they had equally high expectations for his younger brother, Pershing. 

When Ida Mae walked out of the train station onto the busy streets of Chicago for the first time, the city “looked like heaven” to her. She had never seen so many people all at once!

For now, though, Chicago wasn’t the final destination for Ida Mae and her young family. They were headed to Milwaukee, where her sister would receive them.

Harlem, New York, was unlike anything George Starling had ever seen before. First established as a colony of former slaves in the nineteenth century, it had become the center of Black cultural life in New York City by the time he arrived in 1945.

And even though the apartments were cramped and living costs expensive, the vibrant street life of Harlem made George feel truly free for the first time. After crashing at his aunt’s place for a while, he managed to find a job at the railroad, and soon he found his own little apartment in the district.

Robert immediately fell in love with L.A. But like many Black migrants arriving from the South, he faced some initial difficulties in the new world before finding his path.

First, he needed to make enough money to bring his wife and daughters to California. And he knew they were expecting a certain level of comfort after having lived in Alice’s family villa in Atlanta for several years. 

Black migrants like Ida Mae, George, and Robert left the Jim Crow South in hopes of a better life in the Northern cities. This meant they had to leave behind everything they knew, which often included older family members, friends, and sometimes even spouses. 

But like most other migrants, they believed that anything was better than where they’d started out. 

By the end of the Great Migration in the 1970s, nearly half of all Black Americans were living in the North – compared to only 10 percent when the movement began. In Chicago alone, the Black population rose from 44,000 to over one million. 

So, was it all worth it? Were the Black migrants who left the South really better off in the North? Analyzing the rising levels of poverty and crime, as well as housing crises and riots in the Northern cities, many social scientists have concluded that the answer is “no.”