The Warmth Of Other Suns

The previous lives of the three central figures in the South contrasted with their new lives in the North. They could now exercise rights and activities without fear that their doing so might bring reprisals from their white neighbors.

Ida Mae Brandon Gladney registered to vote and worked at a polling place to assist other African-Americans in exercising their right to suffrage, while “back home, no one dared to talk about such things” (363).

As a rail porter, George Swanson Starling observed the best and worst aspects of migration firsthand. He witnessed a widespread behavior called “hoboing”(306-09), whereby African-Americans desperate to escape the clutches of Jim Crow, but too poor to afford tickets, jumped onto moving trains, often holding on to the outside of passenger cars.

Wilkerson discusses the assassination of Florida NAACP organizer Harry T. Moore. Allegedly, the infamously racist Sheriff Willis McCall killed Moore by planting a bomb planted under Moore’s house. Moore’s activist works parallels George Starling’s unionizing, and his assassination shows that Starling could have been lynched with impunity had he not chosen to leave. Wilkerson explores how this kind of danger affected organizers’ arguments in the ongoing debate of whether to leave or stay.

Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, whose life is on the upswing, planned an epic party to celebrate his success and show off his wife and family to the community. By this point, Robert’s practice had expanded to include as patients even such famous people as Ray Charles. 

Not all was perfect in the North. Money could often be tight. Resituated Northern Black people often had to house and care for family and close friends that made the trip up North after them: “it was only a matter of time before just about every colored family in the North, unsettled though they might have been, got visitors” (339).

George Swanson Starling, in his role as a porter, had to deal with Southern whites on a regular basis, and “his formal bearing did not sit well with some of the southern conductors he worked for, who considered him acting above his station” (341). Still, keeping his dignity, George managed to fight back and resist, even getting one conductor fined and suspended for his conduct on the train. This small victory, however, forced George to change to a new train line—after such an incident, even a few minutes in the South could have dire consequences for a Black man.

After treating Ray Charles’s serious wrist injury, Robert Joseph Pershing Foster went on tour with the famous pianist. Travel throughout the country was an eye-opening experience. Later, Foster even delivered one of Ray Charles’s children, who was then named after Foster.  

Wilkerson discusses “the lengths to which some colored people would go to get out of the South” (351) by recounting the story of Arlington High, who was spirited away in a coffin after being falsely imprisoned in an insane asylum for trying to organize African-Americans. The chapter also briefly touches on a problem that would affect some of the migrants’ offspring, a generation born into the freedoms of the North but dealing with problems never imagined by those who had left the South.

On a lighter note, in thanks for all that he has done for him, Ray Charles wrote a song for Robert Joseph Pershing Foster that topped the charts and brought in more people to Foster’s medical practice.