A migration that shaped a nation
Ida Mae Gladney was a sharecropper living in segregated Mississippi decades after the Civil War ended. Born in 1913, as a child she was once dangled from her ankles over a well by white boys, and on another occasion hid from a drunk white farmer randomly shooting around her house. By 1937, after a relative was beaten and jailed for a crime he did not commit, Gladney and her husband migrated to Chicago. By the time of her death in 2004, her state senator was none other than Barack Obama. The remarkable trajectory of Gladney’s life is a central story in Isabel Wilkerson’s acclaimed book, The Warmth of Other Suns, a new look at The Great Migration, in which 6 million African Americans left the South between 1915 and 1970, for cities in the North, Midwest and West. Before the Great Migration, 90 percent of the country’s African Americans lived...