Beautifully tragic and hopeful at the same time. An amazing historical account and an incredibly personal, intimate look at the great migration that shaped the US. I learned and grieved so much.

I really appreciate how much work went into this nonfiction work about the Great Migration. Wilkerson REALLY did her homework. She has meticulously researched the subject, and I value her wide range of source material. The core of her research is in first-person accounts, but she supplements this beautifully with census data, advertiments from the era, newspaper articles, sociology studies, poetry, and novels. The information was skillfully woven together. But I found the overall reading experience challenging. The first part goes into some really intense details about the horrors Black Americans faced in the Jim Crow South. It felt important to fully understand why it could be dangerous, even life-threatening to stay in the South, but there was some pretty graphic violence. I also felt a little thrown off by the timing, as her three first-person accounts migrated in three different decades. 1930 vs. 1955 were very different times, and I felt my brain had to juggle this, as she bounced around from story to story. I do feel like I learned some valuable things, but the process to do so was difficult at times.