This personal reflection is part of a series called The Big Ideas, in which writers respond to a single question: What is history? You can read more by visiting The Big Ideas series page.
The 20th century was nearing its close, as were the lives of the people seated before me. There they were in their windbreakers and tracksuits, pensioners shifting in their folding chairs at a senior center in Los Angeles, or at a regularly scheduled meeting of the Greenville Mississippi Club in Chicago, or at a repast in the basement of a Baptist church in Brooklyn.
These were the people I was hoping to convince to talk with me for a book I was setting out to write about their role in history — or more specifically about the phenomenon known as the Great Migration. Except this official-sounding language, as I learned soon enough, would not get me very far. History does not always happen in the neatly drawn lines of treaties and legislation. It often arises in the agitated hearts of everyday souls yearning to breathe free. History has no start or end date. It is the flow of humanity acting upon its interior will. It could be happening all around us if we just open our eyes to it.
The people I was making my pitch to had been part of perhaps the largest migration in this country’s history: the defection of six million African Americans from the Jim Crow South to the great cities of the North and West, from World War I to the 1970s. Their individual decisions to seek asylum outside their ancestral homeland reshaped every city they fled to and helped pressure the American South to eventually set aside the formal machinery of what could be seen as a feudal order. The movement opened pathways for generations to come. It brought us jazz, Motown, R&B and hip-hop. It produced some of the most recognizable names in American culture, from Toni Morrison and Aretha Franklin to Prince and John Coltrane.
Yet the people who had lived this history did not see themselves as part of any grand narrative; they did not attach a name to their decision to leave all that they had known for places they had never seen in hopes of being free. They saw what they had done as merely the best among the limited options of their era.
I began my research in the middle of 1995, in the Migration’s seminal receiving station of Chicago. But just as I was mapping out the contours of my mission, history began dying with each passing day. An uncharacteristic heat wave struck Chicago that summer. Temperatures climbed to 106 degrees, higher than any recorded in the city since the Great Depression. Seniors — the very people I needed to reach — were stuck in the sweltering three-flats and bungalows of the South and West sides of the city, dying by the hundreds. It was a tragedy of incalculable loss for them, for their families and for society. As a wise man I would later meet in Mississippi once sorrowfully said, “Whenever an elder passes away, we lose a library.”
The search became a race against time. The earliest arrivals to the North were now in their 90s — one World War I veteran turned 100 shortly after I met him — and many were ailing as it was. I showed up at those senior centers and pensioners’ meetings with handouts and sign-up sheets, anxious to talk about the history that had so captivated me. But in those days, the audience drew a blank. If I asked how many had been part of the Great Migration, no hands went up. If I asked how many had come up from the South, nearly every hand went up, along with knowing laughter.
They were fully aware that a mass uprooting had been afoot, and they had taken comfort in the familiarity of the colonies they set up for themselves in the North. But they didn’t see the full significance of their private decisions and had no grand nomenclature for it, or any nomenclature at all. Because they had been right in the middle of it, they could not see how one person added to another person, multiplied by millions, had been a liberation movement all its own.
Some were still nursing the stigma of what they had endured in the South, didn’t want to dwell on it, had not told even their own children of their sufferings. Many carried inside them the memories of dragging their weight in cotton as they worked stoop-shouldered through the field. They remembered the indignities of back doors, side doors, stepping off sidewalks; the terrifying whispers of lynchings the next county over; and for some, the overt threats to themselves. They remembered the talk of people who had fled Jim Crow before them, remembered their own private breaking points. They remembered the pain of rejection in the North and the power of being reborn in a place of their own choosing.
Together, they were able to do what the Emancipation Proclamation and the powers that be, North and South, could not or would not do. They freed themselves in a leaderless revolution. They turned a people captive in the South into a people spread out across the country for the first time since its founding. All of this arose from the singular decisions of individuals who made history without realizing it.
For generations, learning history meant memorizing dates and battles and military generals; laws and edicts; Supreme Court rulings. History was at a remove from regular people and everyday life. Massive historical movements could be erased, misunderstood or underestimated in their significance because they were not at the direction of a recognized leader. We learn of Antietam and Plessy v. Ferguson and Valley Forge but less so of the people buffeted by these turning points and what they did in response to moments of crisis.
Ultimately, I found a way to break through to the elders whose history I wanted to tell. They stuck with how they chose to define themselves — “Well, we came up from the South” — as opposed to using the language of the Great Migration, which was just fine by me. But more “libraries” fell away over the course of the work, and I was spending more time in hospitals and at funerals than at pensioners’ meetings. “If you don’t finish this book soon,” George Starling, one of the three protagonists in what would become “The Warmth of Other Suns,” said to me one day, “I’m going to be proofreading from heaven.”
And he was right. Sadly, not one of them lived to see the finished testament to their labors.
It has been exactly 30 years since I first began wading into our underrecognized past in search of the voices that formal history all too often passes over. In the years since, on occasion, a middle-aged man or woman will come up to me and share a deeply private recollection of a sacred moment with a loved one. They will tell me that what I wrote about the Great Migration was the last book their mother or father or grandparent had read before leaving this planet, that this rendering had given context to their lives and meaning to their sacrifices.
Unbeknownst to us, each of us is making history every day. It could be said that history is everything that happened before the moment we are in. Time makes whatever any of us does history. How would each of us view history if we saw it as something we all make in our own ways, not as helpless onlookers but as rowers in the stream of world events? What might we do in our time on this earth to leave our mark on the affairs of humanity? Generations from now, when our present is long past, what will people be calling the actions, or the inactions, of those of us alive today? The answers lie deep in the hearts of every one of us.
Isabel Wilkerson won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing as the Chicago bureau chief of The Times. She is the author of “The Warmth of Other Suns” and “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.”
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