Migrating Toward a Better Future: OSI-Baltimore Continues “Talking About Race” Series

What: Race and the Great Migration: A conversation with celebrated author Isabel Wilkerson, whose book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, explores the incredible journey of Southern blacks to the nation’s northern and western cities, what long-lasting effects such a population shift has had on our country, and how these brave men and women were “silent actors in racial and social change in this country.”  She will be interviewed by Sherrilyn Ifill.

When: 7 p.m., Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Where: Enoch Pratt Free Library
Wheeler Auditorium
400 Cathedral Street, Baltimore

BALTIMORE—From 1915 to 1970, thousands of black Americans from the South left their homes in search of a better future for themselves and their children. Their shared motivation was an unwillingness to live with racist and segregationist laws that made life intolerable—from very basic, day-to-day challenges and cruelties to larger issues such as education and financial success. Unfortunately, their dreams were not necessarily realized in the urban cities to which they fled, but their history informs all of our lives today.

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration is the narrative of this exodus and its legacy. Isabel Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former Chicago bureau chief for The New York Times, researched and wrote this comprehensive account over nearly a decade. And now she is coming to Baltimore to talk about the topic and her experiences interviewing more than 1,000 brave migrants now spread across the country. Wilkerson, now a journalism professor at Boston University, will be interviewed by Sherrilyn Ifill, civil rights lawyer and associate professor of law at University of Maryland School of Law. 

The free, open-to-the-public discussion is part of OSI-Baltimore’s “Talking About Race” series, which began in 2009 and addresses from different perspectives how we talk (or do not talk) about race, and why it is important to discuss the topic openly and intelligently. The event and series are co-sponsored by the Enoch Pratt Free Library.

Wilkerson’s book tackles a vast and weighty moment in history, but humanizes the epic tale by using the stories of three fascinating migrants, Ida Mae Gladney, George Starling and Robert Foster. At separate times and for different reasons, each made a critical decision to leave difficult beginnings and all they ever knew, to search for a better life in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. According to the book’s publisher, Random House, the decisions made by these survivors of the brutal Jim Crow South made them—unknowingly—“silent actors in racial and social change in this country.”

The book has received great praise from book reviewers, historians, journalists and noted authors. The New York Times named it one of the “10 Best Books of 2010.” Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison called The Warmth of Other Suns “profound” and “necessary.” Tom Brokaw said it was “an epic for all Americans who want to understand the making of our modern nation.” And Jon Meacham, himself a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, deemed the book a “complicated tale, with an infinity of implications for questions of race, power, politics, religion, and class—implications that are unfolding even now.”

Despite the historic election of the nation’s first African-American president, in Baltimore, race is rarely easily discussed. OSI-Baltimore boldly began a public conversation about the topic in 2009, adding “race” to its agenda of important issues to tackle by sponsoring the series.

Individuals are encouraged to get involved in the conversation by submitting their personal stories about enlightening, moving or thought-changing encounters with race to www.storiesaboutrace.org

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Open Society Institute-Baltimore was started in 1998 by philanthropist George Soros as a laboratory to better understand and solve the most intractable problems facing urban America. OSI-Baltimore is a private operating foundation that focuses its work exclusively on the root causes of three intertwined problems—drug addiction, an over-reliance on incarceration and the obstacles that keep youth from succeeding inside and outside of the classroom. OSI-Baltimore also sponsors the Baltimore Community Fellows, now more than 100 members strong, who work to create opportunity and bring justice to people in the city’s most underserved neighborhoods. The office is part of the Open Society Foundations, which aims to build vibrant and tolerant democracies whose governments are accountable to their citizens. Working with local communities in more than 70 countries, the Open Society Foundations support justice and human rights, freedom of expression, and access to public health and education.