The migration of Blacks from the American South to the North is “the greatest untold story of the 20th century,” Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson said to an audience of CEOs and senior executives at Fair360, formerly DiversityInc’s diversity conference in Washington, D.C.
Her book, “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration,” is about Blacks’ emigration from the South between 1915 and 1970 to escape a “mercurial” caste system of color that threatened violence daily. “An African American was lynched every four days,” Wilkerson said. “That was the price of maintaining the caste system.”
Wilkerson talked about how the migration of Blacks was much like the migration of Europeans, Asians and Latinos to the U.S. — the journey was about freedom to express and to build on their talents.
