Isabel Wilkerson · 2010 · rail

Isabel Wilkerson's 2010 history of the Great Migration, the decades-long exodus of six million Black Americans out of the Jim Crow South. She tells it through three lives: Ida Mae Gladney, who rode the train from Mississippi to Chicago; George Starling, who fled Florida for Harlem; and Robert Foster, who drove alone across the desert from Louisiana to Los Angeles. This route follows Ida Mae north on the Illinois Central, the line that carried so many toward the warmth of other suns.

1. 1
   Chickasaw County

   In the cotton country of Chickasaw County, Mississippi, sharecropper Ida Mae Gladney and her family resolve to leave the South after a relative is beaten nearly to death over a misplaced accusation.

2. 2
   Memphis

   At Memphis they board the Illinois Central, the great railroad that drew the migration north out of the Delta toward the cities of the Midwest.

3. 3
   Chicago

   They arrive on the South Side of Chicago, joining the millions who traded the known cruelties of the South for the uncertain promise of the North, as George Starling did in Harlem and Robert Foster in Los Angeles.