By Isabel Wilkerson
A masterpiece. Isabel Wilkerson's impeccable research and captivating narrative weaves the migration stories of Ida Mae Gladney, Robert Foster, and George Starling as microcosms of The Great Migration of blacks who fled the South in search of freedom and a better life from 1915 to 1970. As she takes us on their journeys we meet Jim Crow in all his ugliness and feel the Southern caste system that imprisoned generations of African Americans. She brilliantly interlaces story with appropriate doses of hard demographics and sociological theory. What an education! Wilkerson exposed my misunderstanding of the "desegregated North." She increased my appreciation for and gratitude to those who have endured and overcome injustice so that a more just society exists.