Isabel Wilkerson

“But black students were left on their own.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

“The state funneled money to private academies for white students.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

It occurred to me that no matter where I lived, geography could not save me.

— Isabel Wilkerson

People leave when life becomes untenable where they are.

— Isabel Wilkerson

“At one point, ten thousand were arriving every month in Chicago alone. It”

— Isabel Wilkerson

“One county in Virginia—Prince Edward County—closed its entire school system for five years, from 1959 to 1964, rather than integrate.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

“The reality was that Jim Crow filtered through the economy, north and south, and pressed down on poor and working-class people of…

— Isabel Wilkerson

“If these Negroes become doctors and merchants or buy their own farms,” a southern woman told the celebrated journalist Ray Stannard Baker,…

— Isabel Wilkerson

“...they speak like melted butter and their children speak like footsteps on pavement...”

— Isabel Wilkerson

“The measure of a man’s estimate of your strength,” he finally told them, “is the kind of weapons he feels that he…

— Isabel Wilkerson

“dozens of school districts forwent federal funding rather than integrate their schools.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

“It was a “folk movement of incalculable moment,” McMillen said. And more than that, it was the first big step the nation’s…

— Isabel Wilkerson

“it was the first mass act of independence by a people who were in bondage in this country for far longer than…

— Isabel Wilkerson

That's one of the biggest losses, I think, to African American families, is that people, once they left, they turned away from…

— Isabel Wilkerson

“Rice became a national sensation impersonating a crippled black man, but died penniless in 1860 of a paralytic condition that limited his…

— Isabel Wilkerson

America is made up of people who came from someplace else. Even the Native Americans came over the Bering strait... America is…

— Isabel Wilkerson

I mean my mother migrated from Georgia -Rome, Georgia, to Washington, D.C., where she then met my father, who was a Tuskegee…

— Isabel Wilkerson

“The story describes an incident during the trial of a black schoolteacher accused of disposing of a mule on which there was…

— Isabel Wilkerson

Many immigrants do not talk about what they endured back home. They were fleeing that world, and when they left they didn't…

— Isabel Wilkerson

Anything that could be conceived of that would separate black people from white people was devised and codified by someone in some…

— Isabel Wilkerson

What I love about the stories of the Great Migration is that this is not ancient history; this is living history. Most…

— Isabel Wilkerson

And in some ways, to me, that's one of the inspiring and powerful things about the Great Migration itself. There was no…

— Isabel Wilkerson

“Our Negro problem, therefore, is not of the Negro's making. No group in our population is less responsible for its existence. But…

— Isabel Wilkerson

There were colored and white waiting rooms everywhere, from doctor's offices to the bus stations, as people may already know. But there…

— Isabel Wilkerson

“They traveled deep into far-flung regions of their own country and in some cases clear across the continent. Thus the Great Migration…

— Isabel Wilkerson

My parents sent me to a school across town, an integrated school, where I had the chance to meet and grow up…

— Isabel Wilkerson

“The story played out in virtually every northern city—migrants sealed off in overcrowded colonies that would become the foundation for ghettos that…

— Isabel Wilkerson

At the beginning of the 20th century, before the migration began, 90 percent of all African-Americans were living in the South. By…

— Isabel Wilkerson

“the worst thing that could happen to a colored child in the South was for a parent to hear that a child…

— Isabel Wilkerson

“It was getting to be the 1930s. It was a hurting time, and the farm people almost couldn't give the cotton away.…

— Isabel Wilkerson

“Over the decades, perhaps the wrong questions have been asked about the Great Migration. Perhaps it is not a question of whether…

— Isabel Wilkerson

“The revolution had come too late for him. He was in his midforties when the Civil Rights Act was signed and close…

— Isabel Wilkerson

“The institution of slavery was, for a quarter millennium, the conversion of human beings into currency, into machines who existed solely for…

— Isabel Wilkerson

“Many of the people who left the South never exactly sat their children down to tell them these things, tell them what…

— Isabel Wilkerson

You must leave this world a better place than it would have been if you had not existed.

— Isabel Wilkerson

“It took fourteen hundred pounds to make a bale, and George needed to make a bale every two or three days in…

— Isabel Wilkerson

“And more than that, it was the first big step the nation's servant class ever took without asking.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

“They did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done. They left.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

“County supervisors relented only after losing their case in the U.S. Supreme Court, choosing finally to reopen the schools rather than face…

— Isabel Wilkerson

“That the Negro American has survived at all is extraordinary —a lesser people might simply have died out, as indeed others have.…

— Isabel Wilkerson