This month, I re-read Isabel Wilkerson’s splendid The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. I first read the book when it was published in 2010 and the stories and history Wilkerson wove quickly inserted themselves into both my understanding of our national history and my teaching of it. I never forgot the descriptions of the journeys that Wilkerson describes and when I began to plan the Civics and Citizenship class I will teach 8th graders in the coming school year, I knew that Wilkerson’s book would be a part of it.
At over 500 pages, it’s rather more than the 8th grade is ready for all at once. But earlier this month I commenced a re-read to choose sections from the book to serve as the foundation for the summer reading I will assign the class. In any setting, the book is worth reading. In this moment of historical time, as the growing Black Lives Matter has absorbed our national interest to a greater degree than it ever has before, it was a particularly powerful re-read.
Wilkerson writes like a journalist but thinks like an historian and the combination ensures that the reader flies through the pages. When I did put the book down, my mind was consumed with the arc of the story she was telling.
My Civics and Citizenship class will start with the second founding of the United States, the one accompanied by the Reconstruction amendments. Though the Great Migration doesn’t “officially” start until the second decade of the 1900s, the seeds of it were planted by those amendments and our subsequent national failure at the task of rebuilding a national union with liberty and justice for all. My class will take itself to the 1970s and the close of the Great Migration. At every stop along the way, Wilkerson’s book will accompany the story we will learn.
Parts of the book will be required reading for my 8th graders. I do this in the explicit hope that as they grow into their citizenship, they will read the rest of the book on their own.
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