P4P Reading Recommendations

*Happy Holiday Season*

Thanks for making 2014 a year of wonderful literary and political conversations

&

 for growing our book club to over 200 members.

If you are looking to give some good books this holiday season–and who isn’t–I hope you will consider gifting three of our 2014 selections—

RevolutionaryAlexMyersBookCover
Revolutionary By Alex Myers

 

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The Warmth of Other Suns By Isabel Wilkerson

 

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Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality By Danielle Allen

I invited our authors to add two of their recommendations for your consideration. Alex Myers and Danielle Allen proposed some really interesting selections that I am looking forward to reading and giving.

From Alex Meyer

1) Historical fiction, published recently: I am Abraham by Jerome Charyn.
It’s a 13th century story of a girl who is raised as a boy!

From Danielle Allen

1)  Robert Caro, Master of the Senate from 2002

2) Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, from 2013.  BTW, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.

And Finally, a recommendation from me.  The best book on the history of the modern independent movement is Independents Rising, written by Jackie Salit.  It is a page turner and a great gift for people who want to know the principles and history of the progressive wing of the independent reform movement.  It is a gem!

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Independents Rising Jacqueline Salit

   Happy Holidays and Stay Tuned.  We will be announcing our first 2015 selection soon!

 

 

Highlights from Book Club Conversation with Isabel Wilkerson

Many thanks to Isabel Wilkerson for joining us on the Politics for the People conference call this past Sunday!  We had an energizing, rich and thought provoking conversation about The Warmth of Other Suns.  You can listen to the full call at the end of this post.  (Note: if the links do not appear in the email version of this post, just click on the email to come to the blog.)

I wanted to share three sections of our conversation.  I hope they will inspire you to listen to the full call.  The first clip is my introduction of Isabel and our opening conversation.

Isabel Wilkerson (l) and Cathy Stewart
Isabel Wilkerson (l) and Cathy Stewart

 

In my opening question to Isabel, I asked her to talk some about her 15 year process and how she selected Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling and Dr. Robert Joseph Pershing Foster to be the central characters through which we experience the Great Migration.

She conducted an extensive interview process, meeting people at AARP meetings, senior centers, clubs, etc and shared that she selected these three people

“…who together compliment one another so well.  You get a sense of the socioeconomic differences between them, you get a sense of the different circumstances under which they left and more importantly you get a chance to, hopefully fall in love with people, or get to know these people who were flawed in human, deeply human ways but did a very brave thing. In that way, I think they are people anyone can relate to.”

 ***

Jessie Fields
Dr. Jessie Fields

As Politics for the People blog readers know, Dr. Jessie Fields has been keeping copies of The Warmth of Other Suns at her office in Harlem to share with her patients, as many of them were participants in the Great Migration.  Below is Jessie and Isabel’s back and forth from the call.

 

 

Jessie asked Isabel the following question– “It seems to me that entrenched poverty and social isolation in the inner city have become the new Jim Crow. And that there are still great journeys for the country as a whole to make for African Americans to fully enter the mainstream of America and your book, the Warmth of Other Suns, can help us all to make those new journeys together.  What do you hope people will discover and take away from the book that can be of help for the challenges that we face today?”

In her response Isabel said,

“…one of the things that I had hoped would come out of this book is that people would discover by experiencing both the hardships, the heartbreak, the courage and the fortitude of the people in the Great Migration, they would also see and connect with the fortitude and the heartbreak and all that went before them that their ancestors may have experienced if they came from other migration streams.  And that they would also see that ultimately we all have so much more in common that we have been led to believe.  That means that if you can cut through the divisions and the socioeconomic larger forces that have torn people apart in this country…all of these forces, the larger caste system as I describe it in the South and also a caste system that formed in the North, particularly after the migration was underway.  These divisions separated us in ways that we have yet to recover from.  In fact, maybe never have actually truly dealt with.  I would hope that people could see one another in these stories….”

 ***

Dr. Omar Ali
Dr. Omar Ali

Dr. Omar Ali joined the call from Columbia in South America, where he is vacationing with his family.  Give a listen to his exchange with Isabel exploring the similar experiences of participants in the Great Migration and other immigrants to the United States and also the unique experience of the African American community.

Two comments Isabel made in this part of our conversation stand out for me:

“The common experience that all poor and underprivileged migrants experience is first arriving and being seen as the other, arriving adn being resented and feared upon arrival.  Also coming in with the same desires, hopes and dreams of making it it in this new alien place….Around the world there is a turning against, a fear of people who are immigrating….” On the unique experience of the African American community and the Great Migration: This was “…the only group of people who actually had to act like immigrants to be recognized as citizens in their own country…. These were not people relocating from one job to another.  These people were actually seeking political asylum within the borders of their own country….”

For those of you who would like to pull up a chair and listen to our full conversation with Isabel, here it is!  Enjoy.

In closing, I want to share what the judges of the Lynton History prize wrote about The Warmth of Other Suns:

“Wilkerson has created a brilliant and innovative paradox: the intimate epic…. In powerful, lyrical prose that combines the historian’s rigor with the novelist’s empathy, Wilkerson’s book changes our understanding of the Great Migration and indeed of the modern United States”

The Politics for the People book club certainly agree!

***

STAY TUNED, I will be announcing our next selection soon!    

 

Conference Call Tonight

A REMINDER

Politics for the People Conference call with Isabel Wilkerson

Author, The Warmth of Other Suns

Tonight, Sunday, July 13th at 7 pm, EST.

 The call in number is (805) 399-1200.

The passcode is 767775#. 

 

I want to leave us with two more videos of Isabel to enjoy as we get ready to create a conversation together this evening.

The first is from The Greene Space at WNYC & WQXR and is a conversation in 2013 between Isabel Wilkerson and  award-winning poet and author Carl Hancock Rux. They discuss the Great Migration and the difficult road from the Emancipation Proclamation to civil rights.  In the video Isabel talks about how the 6 million African Americans who fled the South “…changed the region they were fleeing.”

Our second video is from  The Village Celebration and in it Isabel discusses the impact of the Great Migration.  She says, “…when you look at 20th Century life in general from the culture that we often kind of take for granted, from the music, from literature, whole art forms wouldn’t even exist if there had been no Great Migration…”

I look forward to our conversation this evening with Isabel Wilkerson.  Grab your copy of the book, a comfortable chair and dial in.

I asked June Hirsh, a P4P regular, key organizer of our book club, and long time progressive independent activist to share some of her thoughts about the book.

 

June Hirsh at the NYC Independence Party Spring Chairman's Reception, June 2014
June Hirsh at the NYC Independence Party Spring Chairman’s Reception, June 2014

“It’s both brutal and beautiful in the telling of the history of Jim Crow and of the Southern Black migration. An intimate and painful, sad and poignant account of the lives of 3 ordinary people – their friends and families, whose stories represent millions of blacks who migrated, with courage and dignity, unheralded at the time, making this historic move out of fear, anger, vicious racism, desperation, a yearning for a decent and meaningful life – and for it – changed everything.

 

I found the book, heartrending, frightening, horrifying, educational. As a progressive, and an activist, you would think that I had this history seared into my mind and heart. But – not so. Until reading this book, I hadn’t had a full understanding of what Jim Crow actually was. And as this intertwined history unfolded, it became alive and real to me.

 

Just remembering how and what I knew of Emmett Till can give you a sense of this. Yes, I knew he was brutally murdered. I remember it as an unspeakable act. It was a horrific piece of news, but also removed from me – an isolated event.  Now, through this book, really experiencing what happened, what it meant in the fabric of the migration of blacks – a time in our country where blacks were systematically and arbitrarily trampled upon, seen, treated and legislated as less than human, transformed my experience. The account of Emmett Till is an example.

 

Emmett Till, was a child, 14 years old, visiting his aunts and grandmother in the south in the summertime, sent down south by his family, so that he could have a sense of his roots, and have the loving, intimate, honest southern black ways of being, which was missing for southern blacks who migrated to the anonymity and harshness of the north.

 

He was told by his family to be careful how you relate to white people – it’s different than in the north. One needs to understand that Emmett was brought up in the north, by no means a place where blacks were treated as equal, but by and large, not a place where violence towards blacks was a pervasive, and daily occurrence as was the racism of Jim Crow.

 

Who knows what really happened? An innocent gesture, an “uppity” child? What we do know is that Emmett Till was horribly murdered, his body mutilated beyond recognition. At his funeral, where thousands came to pay their respects, Emmett’s mother kept the casket open so that everyone, could see what happened to her child – to “everyone’s child”. Not one of the killers paid for the crime. There were thousands of children mothers, aunts, and uncles, fathers whose stories mirror Emmett Till’s – more. And millions more who suffered all levels of indignities and degrading treatment under in the name of Jim Crow.  I am including a video about Emmett Till that is from the PBS documentary “Eyes on the Prize”.

 

 

 

In The Warmth of Other Suns, every poem, every phrase quoted in the book deserves to be in a book by itself. Each chapter tells an entire story – and together each adds richness to the other.  That said, for me, “Harlem 1996″ in PART FIVE: Aftermath captures the whole book. George Swanson Starling. The way George evolves – paints the picture of a race of people stunted and denied every freedom, yet holding on to their dignity and humanity as best they could, growing and giving in whatever way they could and for others being destroyed by the deadliness of it all.  If you are short on time before our call on Sunday, read this section of the book.

And we continue to build…”

 

***

Politics for the People

Book Club Conversation with Isabel Wilkerson

Sunday, July 13th at 7 pm EST

The call in number is (805) 399-1200 and the passcode is 767775#.

 

June Hirsh, Emmett Till and George Swanson

I asked June Hirsh, a P4P regular, key organizer of our book club, and long time progressive independent activist to share some of her thoughts about the book.

 

June Hirsh at the NYC Independence Party Spring Chairman's Reception, June 2014
June Hirsh at the NYC Independence Party Spring Chairman’s Reception, June 2014

“It’s both brutal and beautiful in the telling of the history of Jim Crow and of the Southern Black migration. An intimate and painful, sad and poignant account of the lives of 3 ordinary people – their friends and families, whose stories represent millions of blacks who migrated, with courage and dignity, unheralded at the time, making this historic move out of fear, anger, vicious racism, desperation, a yearning for a decent and meaningful life – and for it – changed everything.

 

I found the book, heartrending, frightening, horrifying, educational. As a progressive, and an activist, you would think that I had this history seared into my mind and heart. But – not so. Until reading this book, I hadn’t had a full understanding of what Jim Crow actually was. And as this intertwined history unfolded, it became alive and real to me.

 

Just remembering how and what I knew of Emmett Till can give you a sense of this. Yes, I knew he was brutally murdered. I remember it as an unspeakable act. It was a horrific piece of news, but also removed from me – an isolated event.  Now, through this book, really experiencing what happened, what it meant in the fabric of the migration of blacks – a time in our country where blacks were systematically and arbitrarily trampled upon, seen, treated and legislated as less than human, transformed my experience. The account of Emmett Till is an example.

 

Emmett Till, was a child, 14 years old, visiting his aunts and grandmother in the south in the summertime, sent down south by his family, so that he could have a sense of his roots, and have the loving, intimate, honest southern black ways of being, which was missing for southern blacks who migrated to the anonymity and harshness of the north.

 

He was told by his family to be careful how you relate to white people – it’s different than in the north. One needs to understand that Emmett was brought up in the north, by no means a place where blacks were treated as equal, but by and large, not a place where violence towards blacks was a pervasive, and daily occurrence as was the racism of Jim Crow.

 

Who knows what really happened? An innocent gesture, an “uppity” child? What we do know is that Emmett Till was horribly murdered, his body mutilated beyond recognition. At his funeral, where thousands came to pay their respects, Emmett’s mother kept the casket open so that everyone, could see what happened to her child – to “everyone’s child”. Not one of the killers paid for the crime. There were thousands of children mothers, aunts, and uncles, fathers whose stories mirror Emmett Till’s – more. And millions more who suffered all levels of indignities and degrading treatment under in the name of Jim Crow.  I am including a video about Emmett Till that is from the PBS documentary “Eyes on the Prize”.

 

 

 

In The Warmth of Other Suns, every poem, every phrase quoted in the book deserves to be in a book by itself. Each chapter tells an entire story – and together each adds richness to the other.  That said, for me, “Harlem 1996″ in PART FIVE: Aftermath captures the whole book. George Swanson Starling. The way George evolves – paints the picture of a race of people stunted and denied every freedom, yet holding on to their dignity and humanity as best they could, growing and giving in whatever way they could and for others being destroyed by the deadliness of it all.  If you are short on time before our call on Sunday, read this section of the book.

And we continue to build…”

 

***

Politics for the People

Book Club Conversation with Isabel Wilkerson

Sunday, July 13th at 7 pm EST

The call in number is (805) 399-1200 and the passcode is 767775#.

 

Interviews with Isabel Wilkerson

Today, I wanted to share a couple of interviews with Isabel Wilkerson that I especially enjoyed.  In 2011, Kimberly Austin, the host of Footnote on Ebru TV interviewed Isabel Wilkerson.  I think you will enjoy their conversation.

And take a look at this clip from Tavis Smiley’s October 2010 interview with Isabel where he asks her to  “situate… this Migration in the making, in the maturing of America.”

The Politics for the People conference call with Isabel Wilkerson is on Sunday, July 13th at 7 pm.
The call in number is (805) 399-1200 and the passcode is 767775#.

A Casting Call

Isabel Wilkerson devoted 15 years to the writing and research of The Warmth of Other Suns.  She interviewed 1200 participants in the Great Migration to meet the three main characters whose lives bring us into the brutality of the Jim Crow south and the courageous migration to parts unknown.  Each of the characters migrated in a different decade.  Both of Isabel’s parents were part of the Great Migration as well and met in DC–so perhaps you could say that she has been working on this book her entire life.

Isabel came to the project after many years as a reporter with the New York Times where she was head of the Chicago bureau and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for Feature Writing.

I think you will enjoy hearing Isabel talk some about the research for the book and Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster.

 

 

As Isabel says, “I think the lesson of all of this [The Great Migration] is to never give up. And to jump off that cliff if that is what it’s calling for in order to achieve your dreams.”

Hope you are enjoying the journey of The Warmth of Other Suns. Reminder: Our conference call with Isabel Wilkerson is on Sunday, July 13th at 7 pm.  The call in number is (805) 399-1200 and the passcode is 767775#.

A reflection

The Warmth Of Other Suns 

The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson 

The Great Migration, 1915-1970— a brief excerpt

“It was during the First World War that a silent pilgrimage took its first steps within the borders of this country. The fever rose without warning or notice or much in the way of understanding by those outside its reach. It would not end until the 1970s and would set into motion changes in the North and South that no one, not even the people doing the leaving, imagined at the start of it or dreamed would take nearly a lifetime to play out.

Historians would come to call it the Great Migration. It would become perhaps the biggest underreported story of the twentieth century. It was vast. It was leaderless. It crept along so many thousands of currents over so long a stretch of time as to be difficult for the press truly to capture while it was under way.

Over the course of six decades, some six million black southerners left the land of their forefathers and fanned out across the country for an uncertain existence in nearly every corner of America. The Great Migration would become a turning point in history. It would transform urban America and recast the social and political order of every city it touched. It would force the South to search its soul and finally to lay aside a feudal caste system. It grew out of the unmet promises made after the Civil War and, through the sheer weight of it, helped push the country toward the civil rights revolutions of the 1960s.”     Pages 8-9

       A segregated railroad depot waiting room in Jacksonville, Fla., 1921,
      Photo, The  New York Times

 

Dr Jessie Fields Reflects—-

“The development of the entire country has been affected by the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to cities of the North and West. During slavery enslaved Blacks attempted to escape to freedom on the underground railroad, and  for the first three quarters of the twentieth century the “Overground Railroad” was the means to escape the unyielding oppression, brutality and violence of the south.

I am a Harlem physician and reading The Warmth Of Other Suns has helped me understand some things about the lives of my older African American patients that I could never have learned from a medical textI have been having more conversations with them about which southern state they are from and how they arrived in New York City. Some have told me about horrific experiences leaving irreparable wounds. One, an older gentleman who was born in 1934 in Charleston, South Carolina, left at age 18 following his older sister who had obtained work as a live in maid at a home on Long Island. He described the daily fear of crossing a line by simply walking down a street that you were not supposed to walk down.

Reading this book has also made me reflect on how the Great Migration directly affected my life.

I was born, grew up and went to medical school in Philadelphia. My grandparents, great aunts and uncles migrated to Philadelphia from Florida in the 1940s. Gladys Sparks, my maternal grandmother who could not read or write, came from a rural area outside of Jacksonville. Adell Edith Chandler, my great aunt who inspired me to become a doctor and her brothers, one of whom became my grandfather, were from a farm area, Quincy, Florida. The Chandlers went into the restaurant business and Adell owned and operated Del’s restaurant in the Black community of South Philadelphia. They all came North in search of freedom and a better life.

1955, South Philadelphia Adell Edith Chandler, owner (center)
1955, South Philadelphia
Adell Edith Chandler, owner (center)

As Isabel Wilkerson chronicles, this Great Migration “would transform urban America and recast the social and political order of every city it touched.” She uncovers the geographic and the spiritual landscape of the journey. The book explores in depth the lives of the people who left the South, why they left, what they found and how they lived after arriving in the North and West. It is very richly researched and beautifully written.

I was struck by how the author clearly outlines the social and economic practices that deepened poverty and segregation in Black communities across America, and the consequences which we continue to live with today.”

REMINDER: Book Club Conversation with Isabel Wilkerson is Sunday, July 13th at 7 pm. The call in number is 805 399-1200 and the access code is 767775#.

Behind the Title

The title of Isabel Wilkerson’s book comes from a passage written by Richard Wright in 1945.  The first page of The Warmth of Other Suns contains the following lines from Black Boy by Richard Wright:

.  

Richard Wright

“I was leaving the South

to fling myself into the unknown . . .

I was taking a part of the South

to transplant in 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”

― Richard Wright

Powerful poetic and prophetic words that so capture the promise and terror of the move from the South to the North.  Isabel has written about how the title of the book was ultimately selected in an interview on her website.  These lines were written by Richard Wright as part of Black Boy, his autobiography published by the Book of the Month Club.  Originally, the book covered both his childhood in Mississippi and his move to Chicago. The Book of the Month Club asked him to eliminate the Chicago section of the book.  He agreed to do that and had to write an alternative ending.  Isabel writes in the interview, “As soon as I saw it, I knew I wanted to excavate it. I felt it was poetry, beautifully rendered but invisible, buried as it was in the footnotes.”
***
Hope you are enjoying reading The Warmth of Other Suns.  I would love to hear your thoughts, favorite sections, things you are experiencing and thinking about as you read.  Shoot me an email at cathy.stewart5@gmail.com or leave a comment below.
Our conversation with Isabel Wilkerson will be on
Sunday, July 13th at 7 pm. 

Book Selection Revealed

It is with great excitement that I announce our next book club selection.

THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS by Isabel Wilkerson.

I was first introduced to the book back in 2010 by Dr. Susan Massad, a P4P book club regular.  I could not put it down!  The book is a brilliant and compelling look at the Great Migration by over 6 million African Americans fleeing the rural South to the cities of the North, Midwest and West from 1916 to 1970 in search of a better life.

Isabel Wilkerson will be participating in our book club conference call on Sunday, July 13th at 7 pm EST.

You can order your copy at Amazon, or any other bookseller of your choice.

Here is a description of the book from Isabel’s website:

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER

NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, USA Today, The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, The Economist, Boston Globe, Newsday, Salon and many others

In a story of hope and longing, three young people set out from the American South during different decades of the 20th Century en route to the North and West in search of what the novelist Richard Wright called “the warmth of other suns.”

Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster are among the six million African-Americans who fled the South during what would become known as the Great Migration, a watershed in American history. This book interweaves their stories and those of others who made the journey with the larger forces and inner motivations that compelled them to flee, and with the challenges they confronted upon arrival in the New World.

 

 

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