The Warmth of Other Suns Argument Paper

Imagine packing up all of your belongings and moving across country to escape injustice and racism, always having to look over your back, wondering if someone was after you. That is exactly what blacks and their families had to endure during the Great Migration.  In the novel The Warmth of Other Suns, the author, Isabel Wilkerson, discusses the Great Migration of the 1900s, a migration in which millions of African Americans uprooted themselves and their families to move to the North for a chance at freedom. This novel is thought provoking and causes its readers, myself included, to think and relate the events recorded in this novel to our own lives. The stories within this book are very relatable because the issues discussed within are still very relevant today in my life, the lives of other African Americans and their families. The conflicts of subservience, racism, and inequality that occurred then, still occur in this present day and time and many African Americans, myself included, deal with these struggles everyday. Whether it be having to migrate in order to gain more chances or being faced with discrimination,these issues have continued to be very real.

  In the novel, one of the main characters, Robert Foster is on his way to California what he thinks is going to be an oasis, but in actuality is referred to as "James Crow laws" instead of the "Jim Crow laws." After days of searching for a place to rest his head he was continuously and promptly rejected. This event was very similar to one that happened to my mother when she was a young girl. She and her parents(my grandparents) were traveling to the same destination Robert Foster was trying to reach, California. Along their pursuit of California, they encountered some of the same dirty looks, immediate rejections and excuses that Robert Foster did. In Robert Foster's third attempt to find a place to rest his head, this is the excuse that he was given: "We don't share the opinion of the people in this area....