This book tells the story of the Great Migration and the Second Great Migration, the movement of African Americans out of the Southern United Statesto the Midwest, Northeast and West from approximately 1915 to 1970. The book intertwines a general history and statistical analysis of the entire period. It includes the biographies of three people: a woman who left Mississippi in the 1930s for Chicago, named Ida Mae Brandon Gladney; George Swanson Starling, who left Florida for New York City in the 1940s; and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, a doctor who left Louisiana in the early 1950s, moving to Los Angeles.
 
By Isabel Wilkerson