Isabel Wilkerson
Isabel Wilkerson
Isabel Wilkerson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, and the author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
CountryUnited States of America
parent migration georgia
There are certain things that we take for granted that simply would not have existed without the great migration. Motown, for example, would not have existed - it simply would not, because Berry Gordy, the founder of it, his parents had migrated from Georgia to Detroit where he founded Motown, and where did he get his talent?
color knowing people
What I love about the stories of the Great Migration is that this is not ancient history; this is living history. Most people of color can find someone in their own family who had experienced a migration of some kind, knowing the sense of dislocation, longing and fortitude.
black-and-white play people
It was illegal for black people and white people to play checkers together in Birmingham. And there were even black and white Bibles to swear to tell the truth on in many parts of the South.
ghetto african-american migration
The suburbanization and the ghettos that were created as a result of the limits of where [African-Americans] could live in the North [still exist today.] And ... the South was forced to change, in part because they were losing such a large part of their workforce through the Great Migration.
children loss thinking
That's one of the biggest losses, I think, to African American families, is that people, once they left, they turned away from the South. They didn't look back, and they often didn't tell their children about it. They didn't want to talk about it. It was too painful, what they'd gone through and the caste system of the South, which was Jim Crow.
matter geography save-me
It occurred to me that no matter where I lived, geography could not save me.
world has-beens ifs
You must leave this world a better place than it would have been if you had not existed.
both brought exist georgia mean met southern washington
I mean my mother migrated from Georgia -Rome, Georgia, to Washington, D.C., where she then met my father, who was a Tuskegee Airman who was from Southern Virginia. They migrated to Washington and I wouldn't even exist if it were not for that migration. And I brought her back to Georgia, both my parents, actually.