The Warmth of Other Suns

By Vivian Rothstein, Deputy Director, LAANE

Just like many of us in Los Angeles, my family moved here to escape deprivation and build a new life for their kids. In my parents’ case they fled for their lives from the Nazis in Europe. For your family it might have been grinding poverty in Mexico, starvation in the dustbowl, death squads in El Salvador, civil war in Somalia or repression in Eastern Europe.

A remarkable new book, The Warmth of Other Suns, brings to life the harrowing migration experience of 6 million African Americans from the segregated south to Northern U.S. cities from roughly 1920 to 1970. Through three individual life stories the book makes real the brutality and intimidation that was endured.

Like the immigrants of today, newly arrived African Americans faced hostility from those who were already settled and were seen as unfair competitors for jobs, housing and political influence. And like my family, they sought out connections to others from their hometowns who understood them and shared their histories.

If you read only one book this year, let it be this one. And you’ll never think of our country in quite the same way again.

I was leaving the South
To fling myself into the unknown….
I was taking a part of the South
To transplant in alien soil,
To see if it could grow differently,
If it could drink of new and cool rains,
Bend in strange winds,
Respond to the warmth of other suns
And, perhaps, to bloom.
—Richard Wright