Janet Maslin in the Times on Isabel Wilkerson's new book, The Warmth of Other Suns, which documents the ways that blacks sought to flee the Jim Crow south.
She has documented the sweeping 55-year-long migration of black Americans across their own country....
Ms. Wilkerson makes a case that people who left the South only to create hometown-based communities in new places are more like refugees than migrants: more closely tied to their old friends and families, more apt to form tight expatriate groups, more enduringly attached to the areas they left behind. She argues that these people, among them her Georgia-born mother and Virginia-born father who raised Ms. Wilkerson in Washington, D.C., were better educated and more closely tied to their families than other scholars have assumed. She works on a grand, panoramic scale but also on a very intimate one, since this work of living history boils down to the tenderly told stories of three rural Southerners who immigrated to big cities from their hometowns.
...Ms. Wilkerson interviewed more than 1,200 people whose lives had followed the same basic pattern: early years in the South followed by relocation in either the North or the West.
‘What they had in common was an inability to accept the illogic of the Jim Crow world in which they were raised.’
Black people were at least free to leave, to states where the laws were different. Many from Mississippi headed straight up the Illinois Central line to Chicago; others from South Carolina migrated to New York — there’s still a Carolina Club at the AME Zion church around the corner form our house.
But Palestinians in the West Bank, looking at how Palestinians are treated in Lebanon and Jordan, don’t see any such options available. Moving into Israel is an impossibility for them, though Jews can move there from anywhere in the world. And Gazans are virtually imprisoned.
Nope — ain’t no freedom trains in de ‘Holy Land.’