- Step 1: Read Black Metropolis
- Step 2: Read Warmth of Other Suns, parts I, II, VI, and Epilogue
- Step 3: Watch Isabel Wilkerson – The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration
- Step 4: Answer the question
Questions
- How does Isabel Wilkerson define the Great Migration? When did it take place?
- Isabel Wilkerson equates the Great Migration with other vast movements of refugees from war or famine, where people must “go great distances… to reach safety with the hope that life will be better wherever they land.”Talk about migration due to necessity in terms of Ida Mae, George, and Robert. Did each of them migrate out of necessity? How do their stories differ? How were they similar?
- Isabel Wilkerson quotes Black Boy by Richard Wright in which Wright wrote, on arriving in the North: “I had fled one insecurity and embraced another”. What unique challenges did black migrants face in the North? How did these challenges affect the lives of Ida Mae Gladney, George Starling, and Robert Foster?
- How did Wikerson’s personal family experience and history influence the writing of The Warmth of Other Suns.
- What does The Black Metropolis suggest is wrong with or “incomplete” about using the ghettoization model to describe Black communities that formed in northern cities?
- What was the source of African American consumer power, even as most worked in marginalized, low-wage positions?
- Media institutions tend to be large national and/or global corporations such as broadcasting companies, newspaper and magazine publishers, film production companies, music and publishing companies, and some governments. What are some historical and contemporary black examples of media institutions you can think of?