"Over the course of six decades, some six million black southerners left the land of their forefathers and fanned out across the country for an uncertain existence in nearly every other corner of America."
This novel is about the Great Migration, during which around 6 million black people traveled from the South to the North in order to seek a better life. Wilkerson emphasizes how this journey was traumatizing and upsetting for many people, as they had to leave their families and their home for an unknown future.
"World War II had set off a virtual stampede. In all of California, there had been only 124,306 colored people in 1940, before the United States entered the war. But during the rest of that decade, the population almost quadrupled – 337,866 more hopeful souls flooded into California... More colored people migrated to California in the 1940s than had come in all the previous decades put together."
Wilkerson explains how World War II had caused a sharp rise in the number of black people migrating to the North, in hopes of a better life and better opportunities.
