Female Speaker: From the Library of Congress in Washington DC.
Male Speaker: People love Isabelle Wilkerson's book
"The Warmth of Other Suns."
[applause] It moves them.
It informs them.
And it inspires them.
One person wrote a letter to a newspaper in Georgia and said,
"I rank this as one of the top five books I have ever read."
And I don't think that was Isabelle's mother.
[laughter] In fact I know it wasn't.
It was an authentic letter and what author doesn't live
for that single reader.
Isabelle's book also has excited the critics.
The Washington Post calls it "Extraordinary and evocative."
Another newspaper calls it, "A landmark piece of nonfiction."
A third says, "It's brilliant and stirring."
One very special reader has taken an interest in Isabelle's book.
That's the Reader in Chief who lives nearby here in the White House
and who went vacationing in Martha's Vineyard this summer and who is said
to have Isabelle's book in his beach bag.
"The Warmth of Other Suns" tells an epic tale.
It charts the migration of some six million blacks from the South
to the North between 1915 and 1970.
As Isabelle writes, "It was the first mass act of independence
by a people who were in bondage in this country for far longer
than they have been free.
The migrants are bound together by a need
to escape segregation in the South."
And Isabelle writes, "By their hopeful search for something better,
any place but where they were.
They did what human beings looking
for freedom throughout history have done, they left."
The tale of these southerly blacks is uniquely American.
They set off for a better life, for the promise of the American dream.
And the influence of their great migration was profound,
shaping the history of urban life in this country,
spreading African American culture and setting the conditions
for the civil rights movement.
The story is also Isabelle's story.
Her own family made the journey north and for Isabelle,
things have turned out pretty well.
For years she was a national correspondent
and bureau chief for the New York Times.
She's the first African American woman
to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism.
[applause] And the first black to win for individual reporting.
So, you see Isabelle knows a good story when she sees one.
She has said the black migration, she writes about in her book,
is one of the biggest underreported stories of the 20th century,
and it's a big complicated story too.
It took her 15 years for her to research and write,
and her dedication earned her the National Book Critic's award
for nonfiction.
It's my pleasure to introduce Isabelle Wilkerson.
[applause.] Isabelle Wilkerson: Thank you so much
for that beautiful introduction and thank you so much for every one
of you here under this tent to hear me speak.
It means so much to me.
It's so emotional, actually, for me to be here in Washington DC.
I'm a daughter of Washington DC.
I would not exist, literally, if it were not for Washington DC.
Washington DC was the other, "sun" for my parents,
S U N. It was the other sun.
And it's what drew my parents from the south, deep south,
to here in hopes that life might be better for them, and, so,
Washington DC in many respects was the introduction for this book.
This is the book.
This is my copy.
This is my copy of the book.
You can see, it's very well worn.
It's called the salad, actually.
It has been all over the country and to Europe.
And it is my version of it.
This book took me 15 years to write to research and to write.
It took me 15 years to get to the point
where I could stand before you today and talk about it
and that's why it's so special to me.
And if this book were human being, it would be in high school
and dating, which is quite frightening but there you have it.
That's what it took.
The reason why I wanted to immerse myself in something that a lot
of us, thankfully, know but really truly don't, is because,
almost every book begins with a lot of questions.
And I had these questions.
Where did we come from, and what did it take for us to get here?
What was the world that the people in this book left?
What would propel six million Americans to leave the only place
that they had ever known for a place that they had never seen in hopes
that life might be better?
What did it take for them to get out?
How did they choose the places that they went?
How do they make a way for themselves where they landed?
And why didn't they talk about it?
And the goal for the book was to have all of us think about
and ask ourselves, what would we have done had we been
in their places?
What would we have done?
Now, the subtitle of the book the book is, of course, called,
"The Warmth of Other Suns, and the subtitle is, "The Epic Story
of America's Great Migration."
So, it would appear that it's about the great migration,
but in actuality, this book is really
about the four bearers of all Americans really.
These people are proxies for someone in all of our backgrounds,
wherever we might have come from,
who had to have done what these people did,
the people in this book , did just for us to be here today
on this soil, in this place, at this time.
Somebody had to make this great leap of faith, in order for us
to be here, someone in all of our backgrounds.
If you think about it, how many of us know or are related to
or descended from someone, say a great grandmother from Ireland,
who crossed the Atlantic, and then met and married a great grandfather
from Ireland, from Italy Ireland two parts of Ireland.
From Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Asia, other parts of the world,
and create whole new lineages.
That is what happened during the course of the great migration.
People who would never have met otherwise, who would have never met,
actually, met and created whole new lineages in the North
and the Midwest and the West.
This migration in some ways was one
of the greatest underreported stories of the 20th century,
but it also was an unrecognized immigration
within the borders of our own country.
It began during World War I, and it didn't end until the 1970s,
and it is the result of this that the mass majority of people
that you might meet, African Americans that you might meet
in the North and Midwest and West, are actually descended
from this migration, and that's because when the migration began,
90 percent 90 percent of all African Americans were in the south.
By the time that it was over, 1970s,
half of all African Americans were living outside of the south.
That's a massive relocation of an entire people.
And so, this is in some ways the universal human story of longing
and fortitude and courage, that is what in some ways,
made the country what it is.
What these people did, though, had a different tone to it
because these people were defecting a caste system.
That is, this is within our country.
It was the caste system that controlled their every move,
and some ways, they were defecting and seeking political asylum
from a world that's almost unimaginable to us today,
which is why I wanted to be able to understand what it is was
that they left to be able
to understand the magnitude of what they had done.
These people were, in some ways, forced to become the only people
in our country's history to have to leave the land of their birth
and to go someplace within the borders of their own country just
to be recognized as the citizens to which they had been born.
So, I want to say a little bit about some examples of the absurdity
of the world that they were living in.
For one thing, it was against the law for an African American
for a black person, and for a white person
to merely be checkers together in Birmingham, against the law.
Someone must have seen a black
and a white person playing checkers together in Birmingham and,
maybe they are having a good time, maybe too good of a time,
and someone must have seen that, and said to themselves,
"The entire foundation of Southern civilization is in peril,
and we cannot have this".
And actually sat down and wrote this as a law.
Throughout the South in courtrooms, there was actually a black bible
and a white bible to swear to tell the truth on --
a black bible and a white bible to swear to tell the truth on.
And what that meant was that the sacred text, the sacred scriptures
that many of the people
in that region built their entire spiritual world view
on was not acceptable for the two races to touch.
And, I found out about this through reading a newspaper article
in which it was referred to not because of the absurdity of it,
but because it had actually disrupted a trial that was
in progress, because they could not find the black bible for the witness
to take to swear to tell the truth on.
And, so, that meant the bailiff and the sheriff had
to search the whole courtroom in order to find the bible for them
to be able to resume the trial.
And I've been asked since I talked about this, "Well,
were there different versions of the bible that they were to be?
Was there a King James Version for the white witnesses and, maybe,
the American Standard for the black witnesses?"
And it turned out, it was the same one,
it's just that they could not touch the same sacred text.
I've been all over the country talking about this.
The absurdity of the world that they lived in, and I find that one
of my most challenging
and beautifully challenging audiences happen
to be high school students.
And, so I try to make it come alive for them as I do for the reader,
and I came upon, well, it's in the book well the one that I settled
in seemed to make the difference for them,
is one that it's based upon a question I'm going to ask you.
I'd like to see a show of hands of those of you who in the last week,
have been driving, and actually passed another driver on the road?
Yea. I mean really, the two people who didn't raise their hands,
you know, you must have done it
in the last couple of weeks, I mean really.
And it was funny when I asked the question,
people tend to be a little quizzical
because if there a new rule they don't know about?
As far as I know, it's perfectly legal,
but if you were African American, during era of Jim Crow,
which began in the late 19th century and did not end
until the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s, which meant it went
on for three more than three generations and into the life span
of many many Americans alive today.
If you were African American, you could not pass,
you could not pass a white person a white motorist on the road,
no matter how slowly they were going.
And that alone would probably account
for a couple million right there, being willing to say, "I'm leaving."
And, so, when I tell this to the high school students,
I was sharing that with high school students in Hawaii, actually,
and I heard this murmuring in the back of the room where someone said
"Well, I would have honked."
[laughter] And when I said that I had to say, now, "Let's start again.
Let's start again."
If you could not pass individuals on the road,
you most certainly could not honk.
And so then someone else said that, knowing they weren't supposed
to make any noise "Well I would have tailgated them."
And I was like, "If you couldn't pass them on a road,
and you couldn't honk, you couldn't tailgate either."
And isn't it in some ways, a beautiful thing to realize
that this is so far removed from the reality of young people today,
because of all that is happened in part
because of this great migration, that they cannot fathom the world
that propels this great movement of people.
Now, a little about this casks that they were living in.
This cask system was created in many respects
to ensure the economy of the South.
The South relied on not just the supply of cheap labor,
but on oversupply of cheap labor in order to plant and chop, tend,
and harvest the tobacco, the cotton, the sugar cane and the rice
that were the staples of the southern economy, and they needed
to make sure that people were ready and available and oversupplies
so that the labor cost would be as low as they could possibly be.
Many of the people, of course,
were working were working not even being paid.
They were working for the right to live
on the land they were farming, they were sharecroppers.
So they were in a very difficult fix all alone.
This migration did not begin until something happened
that would affect the entire world and that was World War I.
There had been people that wanted to leave for many many many decades,
but they didn't leave until the opportunity arose
and World War I began.
And it was World War I in which the North has a problem.
The North needed labor, and that's
because they were there was this loss of labor of people
who had been European immigrants who'd been working the foundries,
and the factories and the steel mills of the North,
and they had a great need for labor, and they began to go to the South
to find the cheapest labor in the land
and that was African Americans in the South.
Again, many of whom were not working for pay but for the right to live
on the land that they were farming.
So what they ended up what that ended up doing was it meant
that African Americans in all of the major northern cities
that we know were, actually they arrived
at the express invitation of the North.
That is how this began.
The South, however, did not take kindly
to this pouching of their cheap labor.
They did everything they could do to keep the people from leaving.
They would arrest the people on the railroad platforms
if they were preparing to go, on the northbound platform.
They would arrest them from their train seats
as they were attempting to go.
And when there were too many people to arrest, they would wave the train
on through, so that people who had been waiting for months and months
and months for chance to get to freedom had to watch
that train leave without them and then figure
out how were they going to get out.
This migration is so huge though, that I decided to tell the story,
"The Warmth of Other Suns" from the standpoint
of three individual people.
The three represent the six million.
And, those three people are amazing extraordinary individuals
in their own rights.
And they each follow the three major trajectories of this migration.
This migration, like any migration, is not a haphazard
on furling of lost souls.
It was an orderly redistribution of people along the most direct roots
to what they perceive as freedom.
And, so, that meant, that when you're in the north, even now,
you can almost tell where a person is from on the basis of the city
that they happen to be in in the north.
And that's because, people followed three distinctive roots.
And the roots have brought people to Washington, brought my parents here,
was the roots that took people from Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas,
to Virginia, to Washington DC, which is the first stop,
then on to Philadelphia, New York.
And on north, there was a second stream that took people
from Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee, to Chicago,
and Cleveland and the entire Midwest.
And there was a third stream that carried people from Louisiana
and Texas to California and the entire west coast.
In other words, every migration is in some ways a referendum
on a place the people have left, and it's a show of belief and faith
that this new place will be better.
And the beauty of any migration is that people follow certain streams,
so that it's almost a predictable outcome as to where they'll go.
In the same way that if you were to go to Minnesota,
you'd find that there are a lot of people from Scandinavia,
because that is where that migration stream left them.
Now, this migration as any migration, often occurs because not
because of the individual themselves.
A lot of them have already suffered in some ways, whatever it is,
that they had to face in the South,
or wherever they happened to be coming from.
Any migration, which is how all of us, ultimately, got to where we are,
happens because someone across the Atlantic, across the Pacific,
across the Rio Grande, decides that they want something better
for themselves and, more importantly, for their children
and the unseen grandchildren and then,
the unseen great grandchildren, meaning all of us, and that means,
that they have to make a great sacrifice in order to do that,
and in many respects what this does is it means
that these migrations are in some ways leaderless revolutions
that occur, one person added to another person,
added to another person being able to change history,
and that is what happens when you have large masses of people leaving.
Now, one way that this migration changed our country was it was the
very first time in our history in American history
that the lowest caste people signaled that they had options,
and they were willing to take them.
There have been efforts to resist the problems and the challenges
and the restrictions, and, in some ways, the violence of the South
for many decades, but it wasn't until World War I,
that the people began to act upon that.
This was the first time in our history
that the lowest caste people show that they had options
and were willing to take them.
It also meant that, you know,
the civil rights movement would have happened, ultimately,
but this propels the civil rights movement to happen even more quickly
than it would have otherwise and that's because,
while there had been resistance all along,
there had been very little attention given to it in many parts outside
of the South and many of those efforts
at changing the South were crushed before they could even get started.
And, so, when these people left, they began to exert pressure
on the North to take notice, just by their being there.
If you think about American history and how Americans get involved
in conflicts in other parts of the world, you realize that a lot
of times, America gets involved when there are a large percentage
of people, a large enough group of people from that part
of the world whether they're Northern Ireland or parts
of the Middle East, who by their very presence, can exert pressure
on the United States to intervene.
And the same happened with this great migration,
but having a large number of African Americans in New York,
in Washington DC, in Chicago, in Boston, and all these other places
in the North, where there was great industry,
where the media were based.
Suddenly, the cameras and the attention and the reporters began
to go down and pay attention.
It's as if trees were falling, but no one was there
to hear them, and finally, there were.
This migration, also, this outpouring of millions of people,
people who had been the lifeblood of the workers in the south,
this outpouring of people, did other things that served notice
to the South whether it wanted to adhere or not,
that something was happening,
and they were going to have to address it.
In many respects, they actually became harsher
on the people that were there.
In other cases, they began to loosen, but ultimately,
it created a safety valve for those who decided to stay.
Those who decided to stay, now had options
that they had never had before.
Suddenly, everybody knew someone in the new world, as was the case
for people who lived in other parts of the world
and had relatives in America.
They also were sending money back home to help support the efforts,
to support their families, as all immigrants do, and so,
all of those things combined help to prepare,
accelerate the move toward civil rights, and finally,
many of the people who stayed, would often visit people in the north.
They would visit the relatives that they had.
Everyone had an uncle, an aunt, the person who lived
across the road from them.
A Minister, someone that they knew that was now in the north,
and they would come and visit,
and they would see how freer the people were in this new land,
and they would go back, and they would say to themselves,
"Why can't we have this here in the land of our birth?"
And one of the most important people who every said
that to himself was Martin Luther King, who had the opportunity to go
to Boston University to Boston from Georgia,
and to where he met his wife, Coretta Scott,
he would have never met her had there not been had he not been a
part of this movement, and he was one of those people
who saw the freedoms, limited even though they might have been
in those days, but freedoms nonetheless, and he went back,
clearly, as that was an inspiration for him to go back
and leave the final battle for freedom.
And, so this migration had many impacts, north and south.
But, I think to me, what I want, what I would love people
to take away from this from this book, is beyond the fact that first
of all, there are three amazing stories of people
with great fortitude, courage, and great sense of humor,
just amazing people, who I had the privilege of getting to know.
Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, who was a cotton picker, who was terrible
at picking cotton you don't think of people being good or bad at it,
but she happened to be really bad at it.
And not everybody is cut out for that.
And I also think about George Starling,
who had Ida Mae Brandon Gladney left Mississippi for Chicago.
And George Starling, who attempted in a small way to try
to get little better ways and freedom for people
who are picking citrus fruit in Florida, and as a result
of his small and quite efforts to try to do that, ended up having
to flea for his life from Florida to get to Harlem to safety because,
there had been a lynching in the works that was planned for him.
And then, finally, of a Doctor Robert Joseph Foster,
who left Monroe, Louisiana for California
because he could not practice surgery
in his own hometown of Monroe.
And that was a journey that I recreated myself
by renting a Buick as he had.
He said if you would have seen this Buick you,
would have wanted it, too.
[laughter] And I recreated that journey.
I wanted to be able to see what it was like to drive that far
without being able to stop, during that era, African Americans
in the 1940s, 1950s, and into the 1960s, could not be assured
of a place to rest to get gas, to recharge their batteries,
to be able to even eat to even get a meal, and so,
they had to take great care, great planning and caution.
After a certain point, the assumption wanted to stop,
but it turned out he had a very difficult time,
and so I attempted to retreat this journey.
I rented this Buick as he had.
I had my parents with me as generational tour guides,
and we got to the dangerous frightening part of the journey,
where you're going through the dessert, and it's night,
and I had not slept for hours as he had.
I had gone on for many many many hours and into the night
without being able to rest.
And my parents were with me.
As I was about to veer off the road, and at that point we're
in the mountains and we're seeing the signs that say,
80 miles to the next gas station.
I mean it is a forbidding area and terrain and part of our country.
These states are countries unto themselves.
So, I was veering off the road, and my parents said,
"You need to stop the car, and if you won't stop the car, let us out."
[laughter] "We will tell you about it.
We'll tell you about it.
We'll tell you everything that you need," and so we stopped the car,
in Yuma, Arizona because it was no longer 1953.
Things had changed so much.
We have a long way to go as a country, but things have changed
so much that we had no trouble finding a place.
We had a choice of places,
and it actually made me feel even more sketchy for what he had gone
through because he had not had that option.
This migration is so inspirational was or should be or could be for all
of us if we think about it, because this was a leaderless revolution.
There was no one, as in any migration, who sounds the day
or the hour of any migration movement.
These were individuals who made decisions that they thought was best
for them and their children and unseen grandchildren.
In some ways, it renews ones faith and the power
of the individual's decision.
It's almost as if they realize within their bones
that there were too many people, too many of them,
concentrated in one part of the country, one region of the country.
They said, "There are too many of us here are very, are work is devalued.
Our very lives are devalued.
Perhaps, we would fare better elsewhere."
And so they sat out on journeys that took them from Portland,
Maine to Portland Oregon.
They went all over the United States within the borders
of their own countries as immigrants would,
even though they had not been truly immigrants.
And, so, when you think about this, you think about the fact
that it took this great migration for this group of people,
the lowest cask people, to ultimately gain the independence
that they had deserved all along on many respects.
If you think about it, these people, one added to another,
added to another, were able to do as individuals what a President
of the United States could not do, Abraham Lincoln,
did Emancipation Proclamation could not do.
They did what both houses of Congress could not do.
They did what the powers that be, North and South,
could not or would not do.
They freed themselves.
They freed themselves, and that is in some ways [applause] Thank you.
That is in some ways, should be an inspiration, I think, for all of us,
who benefit in ways that are hard to even imagine
from what the people did.
In some ways, what they did helped to open worlds up for people
that we now view as icons of the 20th century, ultimately,
changing 20th century culture as we know it, and literature.
Toni Morrison, whose parents migrated from Alabama to Ohio,
had they made the decision to not do that, she would have been raised
in a world in which it was actually against the law
for African Americans to go into a library and take out a library book.
And you kind of need to get a library book, now and then,
if you're going to become a Nobel Laureate.
[laughter] People such as Richard Wright and August Wilson,
Lorraine Hansberry, almost all of their work was devoted
to if you think about the contents of their work was devoted
to understanding this migration, and the impact that it had had
on the country and on themselves.
It said a whole word of art and culture that we now view
as 20th century culture, but, actually, is the culture and art
that grew out of this great migration.
All of the works, primarily, have Romar Berding and of Jacob Lawrence,
if you can recall, all of those indications are a manifestations
of the great migrations.
Twentieth century African Americans in this American culture is hard
to separate from the culture of the great migration,
because it is the children who have been freed from the structures
of Jim Crow, who were not freed to explore
and be their truest creative selves as a result
of their sacrifice of their parents.
When you think about jazz, you think about Miles Davis,
whose parents have migrated from Arkansas to Illinois
where he had the luxury of being able
to spend the hours it would take to become the master of his instrument
and to create a whole new form of music,
and you think of the felonious parents left North Carolina
for Harlem.
And what would have happened had they not made that decision
when he was five year old, where he would get a chance
to have his generous nourishment in the way that it did.
And then you think of John Coltrane, who also came from North Carolina,
ended up in where believe it or not that is
where he got his first alto sachs his first alto sachs.
And you think about so many people in sports from Jesse Owens
to Jackie Robinson, to even current day people, such as Magic Johnson,
and on and on and on and Bill Russell.
None of them, very few of them, would have even had the opportunity
to become the legends that we know them
to be had their parents not made the sacrifice
to leave the place the only place they'd ever known
for some place far away,
so that their children could actually benefit fit from that.
And, so, one of the things I want to leave you
with before taking your questions are two things:
One is the short passage that is the epigraph to this book.
It's the epigraph, the words of Richard Wright,
who is one of the most famous people that, obviously,
one of the greatest novelist of the 20th century,
who wrote "Native sun," and who was, himself,
a person who participated in the great migration.
These are his words, and the words that give the book its title,
and these are the words that he was thinking as he was preparing
to leave Mississippi for the first time and venture forth
to a place he had never seen called Chicago.
He is a proxy for all ancestors
that we may have who've made this great leap of faith.
He wrote, "I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown...
I was taking a part of the South to transplant an alien soil,
to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new
and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth
of other suns and, perhaps, to bloom."
It's a prayer, really, for sustenance and survival
and protection on the road ahead, which can be, in some ways,
be an inspiration for all of us wherever we happen to be.
Whatever the journey may be, and wherever it may take us,
and I want to leave you with this moment, this idea.
This is the moment that had to have occurred in all of our lineages.
In order for us to be here at this moment, at this place,
on this soil, at this time.
Someone had to have experienced this moment for us to be here,
and that is the moment of departure.
That moment of departure meant that there was someone, usually,
a young person because this is the young person's decision.
People who are older often are not able to make this journey,
but it's a young person's decision.
That moment of departure means that there's a young person in all
of our backgrounds who was standing at the railroad platform,
or at the dock about to board a boat, across an ocean or about
to cross a border of some kind to get to the United States.
And at that place, at that platform, or at that dock,
where the few people who had been important in raising
that individual, there would have been a mother, a father,
a grandparent, an aunt, whomever it might have been who was responsible
for their even being there, and that person could not make the crossing
with this young person.
That person did not know when they would see this child again,
and that child did not know when they would see the person
who raised them ever again.
Remember there was no Skype; there was no email;
there was no cell phones; there were no guarantees, and the next time
that they might hear of that mother or that father,
that person who had raised them, might be a telegram,
that was what they were using in those days.
A telegram saying that your father has passed away,
or your mother is very ill.
You are to come back quickly, if you are to see them alive see her alive.
And that moment had to have happened just for all of us to be here.
And I find great a great sense of awe at the courage and the fortitude
of what it took for them to make that sacrifice and this book
in some ways is a plea that we redefine what we call heroes
in this country, that we redefine what we consider leaders,
because all of us have it was in our own DNA,
the answers to so many questions that may plague us,
because of what people went through before,
in order for us to get here today.
And I truly believe that the message of all of this is that,
if these people could do what they did, with absolutely nothing,
then that means that we, their heirs,
there is nothing that we can't do.
There's nothing that we cannot do, and in fact there's things
that we must do to make their sacrifice worth it.
Thank you so much and I'm happy to take your questions.
[applause.] Thank you.
[applause.] Let's see which side, I guess.
Female Speaker: What did you find unique, not mythical,
about the ultimate destinations
of where African American people chose to migrate.
Specifically, what did you find out about your families
which motivation did you chose to come to Washington DC?
Isabelle Wilkerson: Well, actually,
I have to say that I'm a journalist first, and, therefore,
the stories are, primarily, about the larger tableau
of this migration, and I wanted to tell it through three people,
so that the reader could identify with these protagonists,
see themselves in the people that I've written about.
Feel as they're in the car with Doctor Foster,
as he was about to drive off the road, see themselves,
as their setting on the train with Ida Mae, with her two children,
and her husband as their setting forth for a place
that they had never seen.
But, one of the realities and one of the reasons why have such a sense
of awe and appreciation and gratitude for what any immigrant
or migrant has to go through is that the places
that they go often greatly want the labor, need the labor, but,
oddly enough, sometimes don't want the people, and that's kind of,
you know, how do you have both really?
And, so that meant that all of the people streaming
in to these major industrial cities during the era
of the great migrations, which went on again from World War I until,
well, into the 20th century into the 1970s.
All of them had many, many challenges that they had to face
as they were going into places where their labor was needed,
but they were often brought in as strikebreakers.
They were pitted one against the other.
Immigrants against the native born migrants from the South, and so,
their arrival in these cities was often quite harrowing for them.
They had come from a place where believe it or not, every three,
four days an African American was lynched for some perceived breech
of the caste system that I described, and they arrived
in places where they did not have to so much worry about that
on a daily basis, but they had to worry about whether they'd be able
to get work, where they might be able to live.
They were confined to places that were overcrowded
and where they were overcharged
for the subdivided tenements where they were living.
And, so, life was very hard for them, and one of the reasons I find
such an inspiration for what they went through and all immigrants,
really, is because for immigrants, failure is not an option.
They have to succeed because there's no backup for them back at home.
The people back home are looking to see if they can make it,
and often are looking at help or they're often bragging back home
about somebody they know who's gone up north and,
they're looking to them to succeed.
So, they had to make a goal of it on their own.
And, my heart goes out to all that they went through and all
that any immigrant goes to.
And this book, in some ways, the people are proxies
for anyone who's ever gone through that.
So I should take this side?
Female Speaker: Good afternoon, Ms. Wilkerson.
Thank you for that great book.
Weeks after I read it, I realized that there were no illustrations
or pictures of the people, and I know you drew good word pictures
of them, thank you, for that and their struggles, but it hit me,
why were there no pictures?
Isabelle Wilkerson: There were no pictures because my editor
and I simultaneously agreed that we wanted you to picture yourself
and not be bothered by what you thought they looked like.
We wanted you to see yourself, but more importantly, your grandparents,
your great grandparents, your parents, and yourself.
We wanted it to be a universal human story
and that's what we believe it was.
Thank you so much for that.
Female Speaker: Hi.
My family came from Virginia.
I'm from Philadelphia so that's part of that migration.
Isabelle Wilkerson: It's classic.
Female Speaker: And then New York is the next train stop, you know,
you caught this two state jump.
I would always say it that way,
but why do you think they wouldn't go into Canada?
You mentioned the three unite within the borders, you say that a couple
of times, but Canada was in theory freer and maybe,
whatever, why not Canada?
Isabelle Wilkerson: My the question was why didn't they go onto Canada
as had occurred during the Underground Railroad?
And one of the reasons is because they were American,
and they were American citizens, and it's my belief that they believe
that within the borders of their country, they should be recognized
as the citizens to which they had been.
They had descended from people who had been
in this country for centuries.
Even to this day, African Americans who were descended from slaves,
as they grew have lived fewer years as free people than in slavery,
and it would take another hundred years before
that balance is made even.
That is how long slavery had existed in this country,
and in some ways I believe it was the staking of a claim
of their citizenship in this country.
Female Speaker: Yes.
I'm going to ask you to thank Isabelle Wilkerson
and in seven minutes the conversation will continue
with book TV.
They'll be taking live calls and answering more of your questions,
so I'm going to put you on hold for about seven minutes.
Please stay with us, and thank you so much.
[applause] Female Speaker: This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at LOC.gov.
[end of transcript]