48 pages • 1 hour read
Isabel WilkersonThe Warmth Of Other Suns
Isabel WilkersonNonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Key Figures
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Book Club Questions
Tools
BetaSymbols & Motifs
The South: The Caste System
Wilkerson uses the term “caste system” throughout The Warmth of Other Suns to refer to a rigid social structure that allows no intermixing between social classes and offers no upward mobility. The South was truly a caste system—the complete opposite of the America’s founding principles. In the North, although there was prejudice, there were also more options, and the social structure was different.
The South was a feudal society, with a small landholding aristocracy subjugating enslaved people who worked the land. This fixed social order and its strong class distinctions upended during the Civil War and after the end of slavery. Following the Reconstruction period, white Southerners enacted laws and regulations that would re-establish the previous way of life, which brought back near-slavery conditions. The small hope that freed African-Americans could unite politically with poor whites was dashed by policies enforcing Black inferiority and stoking poor white resentment about people with whom they now competed for jobs. Whatever rights the African-American community had gained after the Civil War were stripped away without legal recourse. Instead, whites dealt swiftly and violently with African-Americans aspiring to move out of the bottom caste.
The North: The “Promised Land”
The Warmth of Other Suns lays out a dichotomy between the “North” and the “South” as seen by many Southern blacks from approximately 1914-1970. (Because much of the “West” was in the Union during the Civil War, this analysis refers to all non-Southern areas as the “North.”)
The North, due to its strong manufacturing base, large cities, and diverse populations, was a beacon to many African-American Southerners—a place where one could escape the confines and caste system that permeated the Jim Crow South. This idyllic vision of the North was often called the “Promised Land”—a Biblical reference connecting it with the land God promised Moses after the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt.
In reality, though the North was rife with prejudice, it did offer Black people many of the things—advancement, freedom, mobility, and security—lacking in the South. The North was a in a sense, the “real” America, where Southern African-Americans might, for the first time in their lives, be free.
Jim Crow
Originally the name of an 1830s minstrel show performed by Thomas Dartmouth Rice, a white man, the term Jim Crow “caught the fancy of whites across the country and came to be used as a pejorative for colored people and things related to colored people” (41). By the 1840s, the term Jim Crow was the collective name of laws that segregated black and white people in the South (41). The idea of Jim Crow came to be synonymous with the Southern racism. The desire to escape Jim Crow drove many Southern African-Americans to seek their fortunes in the North, where segregation was not legally codified. However, since de facto segregation existed in the North with tacit official sanction, migrants nicknamed the system there “James Crow” (211)—Jim Crow’s more polite and sophisticated variant.
Unlock all 48 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
