Reviews

• Must Read

  Must Read

• 感動の米国社会史

  さすがにピュリッツア賞受賞の著者だけに600ページの大作ではあるが、引き込まれる迫真的な内容である。1620年代に白人によってアフリカから強制的に新大陸に送られ奴隷となった黒人は、1865年の奴隷解放にもかかわらずずっとＪｉｍ Ｃｒｏｗと呼ばれる黒人差別にさらされてきた。あまりの人権無視に耐えかね自由を求めて、南部から北部へと大移住が1930年ごろから1970年ごろまで続いた。本書ではそのなかでシカゴ、ニューヨーク、ロスアンジェルスへ移住した3家族の例を取り上げている。居住地、鉄道やバスの座席、教育、職業、ホテル・レストランの利用などあらゆる面で差別を受けながらも必死に働いた姿が克明に描かれている。事実の裏づけをとるため1200名にわたる関係者へのインタビューもなされている。黒人なまりもそのままで、綿摘みや果実採取にごまかしの低賃金で強制労働させられた人たちの声が聞えるようだ。最近の新聞によると彼らの住居は古くなり崩落の危機にあるようだ。しかしアメリカ大統領にアフリカ系が選ばれたこと、スポーツや芸術、学者などの世界で黒人が活躍しているなど、黒人差別は薄れている。それは他の人種に向けられているのかも知れない。

• Historic masterpiece! Well done!

  This book is a meticulously researched saga of the Great Migration of African Americans in the Jim Crow South to the West and North. The narrative follows three brave individuals on their journeys. It is a amazing achievement about real heros, packed with raw history. I'm at a loss as to how to write a review worthy of this masterpiece. Ms. Wilkerson's exemplary storytelling and years of interviews and research and her own history come together to tell this incredible story. She writes about the best and worst of humanity from punishing lynchings to unyielding courage and perseverence of the oppressed. Here are a few of the many passages that stayed with me. "A series of unpredictable events and frustrations led to the decisions of Ida Mae Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Pershing Foster to leave the South for good. Their decisions were separate and distinct from anything in the outside world except that they were joining a road already plied decades before by people as discontented as themselves. A thousand hurts and killed wishes led to a final determination by each fed-up individual on the verge of departure, which, added to millions of others, made up what could be called a migration." "Any migration takes some measure of energy, planning, and forethought. It requires not only the desire for something better but the willingness to act on that desire to achieve it. Thus the people who undertake such a journey are more likely to be either among the better educated of their homes of origin or those most motivated to make it in the New World, researchers have found." "Contrary to modern-day assumptions, for much of the history of the United States—from the Draft Riots of the 1860s to the violence over desegregation a century later—riots were often carried out by disaffected whites against groups perceived as threats to their survival. Thus riots would become to the North what lynchings were to the South, each a display of uncontained rage by put-upon people directed toward the scapegoats of their condition. Nearly every big northern city experienced one or more during the twentieth century. Each outbreak pitted two groups that had more in common with each other than either of them realized. Both sides were made up of rural and small-town people who had traveled far in search of the American Dream, both relegated to the worst jobs by industrialists who pitted one group against the other. Each side was struggling to raise its families in a cold, fast, alien place far from their homelands and looked down upon by the earlier, more sophisticated arrivals. They were essentially the same people except for the color of their skin, and many of them arrived into these anonymous receiving stations at around the same time, one set against the other and unable to see the commonality of their mutual plight." In the following, Robert Pershing Foster tries to get a hotel room to rest in New Mexico on his long drive to California: "He replayed the rejections in his mind as he drove the few yards to the next motel. Maybe he hadn’t explained himself well enough. Maybe it wasn’t clear how far he had driven. Maybe he should let them know he saw through them, after all those years in the South. He always prepared a script when he spoke to a white person. Now he debated with himself as to what he should say. He didn’t want to make a case of it. He never intended to march over Jim Crow or try to integrate anybody’s motel. He didn’t like being where he wasn’t wanted. And yet here he was, needing something he couldn’t have. He debated whether he should speak his mind, protect himself from rejection, say it before they could say it. He approached the next exchange as if it were a job interview. Years later he would practically refer to it as such. He rehearsed his delivery and tightened his lines. “It would have been opening-night jitters if it was theater,” he would later say. He pulled into the lot. There was nobody out there but him, and he was the only one driving up to get a room. He walked inside. His voice was about to break as he made his case. “I’m looking for a room,” he began. “Now, if it’s your policy not to rent to colored people, let me know now so I don’t keep getting insulted.” A white woman in her fifties stood on the other side of the front desk. She had a kind face, and he found it reassuring. And so he continued. “It’s a shame that they would do a person like this,” he said. “I’m no robber. I’ve got no weapons. I’m not a thief. I’m a medical doctor. I’m a captain that just left Austria, which was Salzburg. And the German Army was just outside of Vienna. If there had been a conflict, I would have been protecting you. I would not do people the way I’ve been treated here.” It was the most he’d gotten to say all night, and so he went on with his delivery more determinedly than before. “I have money to pay for my services,” he said. “Now, if you don’t rent to colored people, let me know so I can go on to California. This is inhuman. I’m a menace to anybody driving. I’m a menace to myself and to the public, driving as tired as I am.” She listened, and she let him make his case. She didn’t talk about mistaken vacancy signs or just-rented rooms. She didn’t cut him off. She listened, and that gave him hope. “One minute, Doctor,” she said, turning and heading toward a back office. His heart raced as he watched her walk to the back. He could see her consulting with a man through the glass window facing the front desk, deciding in that instant his fate and his worth. They discussed it for some time and came out together. The husband did the talking. He had a kind, sad face. Robert held his breath. “We’re from Illinois,” the husband said. “We don’t share the opinion of the people in this area. But if we take you in, the rest of the motel owners will ostracize us. We just can’t do it. I’m sorry.” Wilkerson wrote this about Harlem and the Harlem Renaissance: “The basic collapse of all organized efforts to exclude Negroes from Harlem was the inability of any group to gain total and unified support of all white property owners in the neighborhood,” Osofsky wrote. “Landlords forming associations by blocks had a difficult time keeping people on individual streets united.” The free-spirited individualism of immigrants and newcomers seeking their fortune in the biggest city in the country thus worked to the benefit of colored people needing housing in Harlem. It opened up a place that surely would have remained closed in the straitjacketed culture of the South. By the 1940s, when George Starling arrived, Harlem was a mature and well-established capital of black cultural life, having peaked with the Harlem Renaissance, plunged into Depression after the 1929 stock market crash, climbed back to life during World War II, and, unbeknownst to the thousands still arriving from Florida, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Virginia, not to mention Jamaica and the rest of the Caribbean when George got there, was at that precise moment as rollickingly magical as it was ever likely to be. Seventh Avenue was the Champs-Élysées, a boulevard wide and ready for any excuse for a parade, whether the marches of the minister Father Divine or several thousand Elks in their capes and batons, and, on Sunday afternoons, the singular spectacle called The Stroll. It was where the people who had been laundresses, bellmen, and mill hands in the South dressed up as they saw themselves to be—the men in frock coats and monocles, the women in fox stoles and bonnets with ostrich feathers, the “servants of the rich Park and Fifth Avenue families” wearing “hand-me-downs from their employers,” all meant to evoke startled whispers from the crowd on the sidewalk: “My Gawd, did you see that hat?” Virtually every black luminary was living within blocks of the others in the elevator buildings and lace-curtained brownstones up on Sugar Hill, from Langston Hughes to Thurgood Marshall to Paul Robeson, Duke Ellington, and W. E. B. Du Bois, on and off, to Richard Wright, who had now outgrown even Chicago, and his friend and protégé Ralph Ellison, who actually lived in Washington Heights but said it was close enough to be Harlem and pretty much considered it so." If I were to approach reading this book again for the first time, I would slow down and savor it. I might expect to read it over a period of several months instead of over a week as I did. There is so much to take in. I rushed it.

• Ilustrador

  Aún me queda un poco para terminar el libro, pero hasta ahora me ha gustado, la narración de las historias que se entrelazan para dibujar la historia de las migraciones internas, el racismo, la forma de vivir en el sur durante varias generaciones descendientes de esclavos. Me gusta porque los datos no están uno tras otro, sino que se entremezclan en las historias y anécdotas de los personajes que los llegas a sentir como si fueran tus vecinos. Altamente recomendable.

• Elegy to a Forgotten Generation

  Over the course of six decades in the 20th century 6 million black Americans left the South of the United States to settle the cities of the North and West. The Great Migration was greater in numbers and equal in significance to any other population movement in America’s history. It has received far less attention than a handful of 17th century pilgrims, yet it reshaped America. This fantastic book tells that story through the eyes of the migrants themselves. The author has a deeply personal connection to it – her own parents made that journey. She interviewed over a thousand people in the course of her research, The narrative’s focus is on three of them. This is the story of their lives. Ida Mae left Mississippi in 1937 bound for Chicago. George fled Florida in 1945 and settled in Harlem, in 1953 Robert drove from Louisiana across America to Los Angeles. They tell us why they decided to go, how they left, what they encountered when they arrived and how their lives evolved. They took their destiny into their own hands out of the grasp of Jim Crow. They decided for themselves. Not all their decisions were perhaps the best but none regretted leaving the South. What lives they lived were the lives they made. A common thesis, that still persists, asserts that the surge of migration took the least capable and implanted them in such numbers that the cities they settled in were destabilised, anomie and crime supplemented deprivation. She refutes this. The migrants were the most resourceful in their communities as their very decision to leave demonstrated. As a collective they remade America, North and West and East and South in multiple positive ways. The final chapters recount their final years. Isabel Wilkerson did an important service in capturing their memories before they passed away. This is an elegy to a forgotten generation. There is an issue of course with memory. The interviewees were in their seventies and older, they were frail so reliability and accuracy must be factored in. But this is true of all oral history and in this instance counteracted by the sheer number of supported interviews she conducted and her use of a wide range of other sources. A remarkable and moving story.

• Un llibre clau per comprendre el conflicte racial als EUA

  És un llibre magnífic que permet conèixer amb rigor científic i, al mateix temps, amb un estil entre literari i periodístic que és un encert, aquest gran i desconegut fenòmen històric. T'ajuda a entendre i molt, la tensió racial als estats units que, desgraciadament, és contínuament notícia. Per aquells que vulgueu practicar el vostre anglès, el nivell lingüístic és assequible per un anglès B2

• informativo

  Bastante informação sobre a história da divisão de brancos e negros dos estados unidos. Uma obra de leitura obrigatória para entender a divisão e segregação do país

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