>> welcome to the plapl. tonight, two powerful writers, one in fiction, one in non-fiction. we began with israeli novelist david grossman. his book "to the end of the land." >> writing this book was an act of choosing life against the temptation of despair, against the gravity of despair and grief and the book is about the wholeness of life. it's a very vital book. >> rose: and the power of story of african american from the south to the north. isabel wilkerson's book is called "the warmth of other suns. " i grew up the daughter of people who migrated from the south to the north. you could say i've been writing it all my life. it was a story i was surrounded

by in washington, d.c. where everyone around me, the parents were from south carolina, north carolina, georgia. my mother was from rome, georgia migrated to washington, d.c. my father migrated from southern virginia to washington, d.c. different decades, would never have met had there been no great migration, had they not left the south and landed in the same city. so in some ways i exist because of the great migration and i think i've been in some ways writing it all my life. >> rose: david grossman and isabel wilkerson coming up. maybe you want school kids to have more exposure to the arts. maybe you want to provide meals for the needy. or maybe you want to help when the unexpected happens.

whatever you want to do, members project from american express can help you take the first step. vote, volunteer, or donate for the causes you believe in at membersproject.com. take charge of making a difference. captioning sponsored by rose communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. >> rose: david grossman is here, he's one of israel's preeminent authors. he writes both fiction and

non-fiction. his novel "sea under love" explored the holocaust through the eyes of a child. when the the intifada broke out in 1988, the book was called "prophetic." his latest novel has been publish called "to the end of the land." i'm pleased to have him back at this table. welcome. >> hi, charlie. >> rose: what is it about it? >> it is about life within conflict, violent conflict. the book i wanted to write in two layers, two levels. one is the bigger layer of the israeli/palestinian conflict. wars and occupation and terrorism. everything that is there that is our daily bread so to say. but what interested me no less is to the life of a family?

with all the details and nuances of the family i always believed that the greatest drama of humanity is the drama of the family and the most significant event in human history they have not occurred on battlefields or palaces or parliaments but rather in kitchens and bedrooms and rooms of children and i wanted to show how the middle east conflict projects its brutality into this tender bubble of one family and what it does to it. >> rose: tell me your characters. >> well, the main one is ora, ora which in hebrew means life. she's quite typical israeli woman. she's around 50, very impulsive. very sensual, exposed in her feelings.

straightforward. is not afraid to express her opinions, sometime she is overflows we motions. i think she's very familiar to everyone who reads her in israel and she's the mother of two boy they are not boys anymore, they are 24 and 21. but she's the mother of ofer. and in the beginning of the book she is waiting to offer to be released from the army and she plans to go to a trip on foot with anymore the galilee of israel and she prepares backpacks and all that. and on the very last day of ofer in the army, there's a new military operation that israel initiates against the palestinians in the west bank and he volunteers to go there. he does not go to be... he does not want to be released from the army. he says that for three years he was trained for this operation, he will not abandon his comrades. he wants to go to this operation

and she's left alone. and all her hopes that while she will be with him in the galilee, she will be able to reclaim him. because when guy in to the army, they change. is they become more stiff. they have to cover themselves in a kind of suit of armor in order not to be exposed to the reality of the conflict. and she believes that if they will be alone together in the nature, he will be able to melt again and to become the child that she knew but now suddenly she's alone and she goes alone to the galilee. but on her way she almost kidnaps a man called avram and avram is the love of her life. he's not her husband but he had... he's affected her all her life. and avram, who was like a sparkle of light and life and

creativity and passion when he was a young man, in the war of '73, the yom kippur war he fell captive at the hands of the egyptians and he returned broken and he doesn't want any contact with life. but ora by taking him to the galilee and starting to tell him the life story of ofer in a way gradually slowly she commits him back to life and to life of family and what does it mean raise a child. and she tells him about all the smallest details from which we create one human being in the world. we accumulate one human being in the world. and she does it because this is her only way to protect her son who is now in the battlefield. so you see the story is both about the minutiae of life and the wholeness of life, of one family and at the same time it takes place against the terrible

situation of the conflict. >> rose: the power of emotion in israel seems different than almost any other place. >> yeah, you are absolutely right and i always think that our politics is made of 99% of emotions and only 1% of logic. and by the way, maybe this is also the way to approach this conflict, you know? emotionally. to really understand the emotion the deep and sharp emotion of both peoples involved. to be attentive to their insult, to their sense of humiliation. to their... even to the talent of self-destruction, >> to see all the places where they are both distorting themselves and only if you allow yourself, you expose yourself to this high voltage of

emotionality, only then you will be able to understand the depth of the tragedy and maybe then you will be able to set the people free. >> rose: if israeli leaders could live in the occupied territory as you did and feel and see, would they make different decisions? i guess they know what the reality is. maybe not in details. maybe they do not do what they should do and this is really put themselves in the place of the other and see reality from the point of view of the palestinians i think it's very important for us. it's very important because only then they will be in contact with reality, not onlyle with the projection of their nightmares or their wishful thinking. but basically i believe that netanyahu, he know it is situation in the occupied territories and yet i think he is more dominated by worry for

israel, by fears, by suspicion regarding the intentions of the palestinians. >> rose: you know, i'm fascinated by the release of the documents from the israeli government about the '73 war and how close it was you're part of that conversation, you hear that conversation, it's a big topic in israel. what is the... it says how close it is always for israel in this case they were surprised by a war. and also by the tenacity of the arabs. >> yeah. this xi ten shl fear prevails all the time in israel. i know that when you look at israel from the outside, from what you see on the t.v. screen, you see a kind of military fist, iron fist. but we see the palm of the hand and the fragility of israel. and, you know, in the book which is called "to the end of the

land" and has this double meaning as well, yes... >> rose: what does it mean "to the end of the land"? >> first it means or asks the palestinian driver to take her to the police where israel ends but also it echo this is option that terrifies us all the time that there might be an end to this country which really freaks me out to think that after 62 years of independence, sovereignty, having enormous strong army yet our existence is not guaranteed. is not solid. and at a certain moment when ora and avram, they spend on the top of the mountain and they look around at the wonderful view of galilee and she tells him "isn't it always like that with israel that every encounter with it is also bidding farewell to it?" this doubleness exists all the time. you know, if you read in an american paper that america

plans its road plan for the years 2030 it sounds normal, >> reasonable. no sane israeli will make plans for such a long time in advance and i'll tell you, when i think of israel 20 or 30 years from now i feel a twinge in my heart as if i violated a taboo by allowing myself too much portion too huge portion of future. >> rose: too optimistic in your assumption that it will be there. >> yes. and this must be corrected. this must be changed. it's impossible that we shall continue to live in this uncertainty. and i believe that only peace will allow us to enjoy this will sequence of generation and having a solid feeling of future and also something that is maybe hard to understand but i will call it solidity of existence. of the people who is rooted in its own land, who has fixed borders between him and his neighbors until now 62 years

israel does not have fixed borders. our borders all the time are receding, expanding. it's like someone who lives in a room that the walls are moving all the time or the ground is shaking under his feet all the time. this cannot go on like that forever. only peace we'll a... only peace will allow us in israel to have a feeling of home, of real home, you know? israel was created so it will be the homeland of the jewish people. the jewish people who never really felt at home in the world. this is our tragedy. and we have israel and still it is not the home that we need and we deserve and we yearn to. only peace will allow us to have home and future and this solidity of existence. >> rose: can you afford to think about what israel would be like if there was peace? >> i think a lot about it and i think that even thinking about

it is obligatory because most israelis and palestinians they so deeply misbelieve in the option of peace that they despair of this possibility at all. and i think it's so necessary. >> rose: you have to believe in it? >> to believe in it. to insist on believing in that. to make a kind of a massage to the reluctant consciousness, the terrified consciousness. so we shall know what is the alternative and remember that there is an alternative. that there's not any divine decree of orders to live by the sort of our life. >> rose: what is the possibility of the power of literature? >> literature cannot change, un. people say that we have great influence in israel, but if that was true, then israel might have looked a little different from what it is now. literature has the ability to use the right words, not the

words of that... the big systems, the government, the army, the media or our fears fabricate for us but all things by the right name and by that to remove the buffers that separate between the individual and the situation but more than everything, i think, writers have this ability to look at the point of view... to look from the point of view from the other even if this other is my enemy. it does not weaken my stand, my position. it does not weaken my israeli identity. >> rose: writers and the power to do that but politicians don't. >> i'm afraid that most politicians... >> rose: but why? >> that's a very good question. why is that? maybe because they feel especially in regions like us where violence is so dominant maybe they feel that they have to address the fears, the

anxiety of the people in order to become popular. >> rose: it is often said by people who have reviewed this book that the arab driver, that you write brilliantly of his perspective and his relationship. >> yes, of course. it intrigues me, the situation of the israeli and palestinians who are trapped between us, the israeli jewish majority and their brothers in the occupied territories, the other palestinians. and the israeli palestinians, they in their life in their flesh and blood that feel this ambiguity and doubleness of the situation. and as i said, they are trapped between us. but... okay. >> rose: go ahead. >> what i tried to show is how this character sammy, who is almost... i mean, he knows how to use the israeli/jewish narrative and he uses versus

from the bible and he knows how to use proverbs in a way that suddenly makes him the new jew, so to say. yes? the jews used knob the diaspora when they were weak and dependent on others and to use his it withs in a very shrewd way against all the centers of powers of the israeli society and he and ora, they are friends they are good friends. and they drove together for hours and they like each other and she's very sensitive and attentive to his complexity and to his unbearable situation. and yet suddenly when there is tension between them in the car when she without thinking asks him top drive her son ofer to the gathering point of the army from which he will be sent to the occupied territorys to fight the brothers of sami, suddenly

tension grow there is and in a minute they become representatives of their hostile peoples and when we are representatives we tend to overadvocate and to say things we don't really believe in. things that even humiliate us as human beings. but you could... you can see how in this little bubble of? the taxi all the israeli/arab conflicts suddenly comes to life. >> rose: the dedication of this book, 1985 to 2006. there it is, the death of your son. >> it's very hard for me to speak about him in public. i started to write the book some months before he went to the army. i felt that it would be a way

for me to accompany him as much as i can. >> rose: you almost thought that it was a protective... >> i had this wishful thinking, you know, this magical thinking that writing might protect him but i do not really believe in that. words cannot prevent that. words can make the world a little more understandable. it can make some place in a world that became crazy, a place in the sense of a home. but i didn't think it would really protect him. and three years and three months after i started writing the book the second lebanon war broke out and he was sent to lebanon and a missile hit his tank and killed him. >> rose: and his colleagues, too four of them were killed at one time. >> yes, all the four. >> rose: this was how many days

before? >> hours before the end of the war. >> rose: not days, hours. >> hours. >> rose: you have said to me... you're a writer and this is both literature and reality so as much as you can, help me bring these together and how it came together for you. >> it's still hard for me to speak about it. you sigh, the book is so much about how difficult and even sometimes how heroic it is to create life in reality like ours and how easy it is to destroy life. i know... i can say one thing. after the shiva, after the seven days of lamenting, i went back

to writing this book i felt that for me it is the only possible way to go back from the exile that such loss creates. you know, when something like that happens you feel exiled from everything you knew. from the whole story of your life. >> rose: exiled? >> yeah, you do not belong anymore to anything. nothing can be taken for granted after that. and going back to write the story and to tie again the threads that were torn and to make some sense in this chaotic world, this is how i felt regarding my life and the world back then. and to be able to infuse life into characters again and to imagine and to insist on this word and not the other word to

find the precise definition for a feeling or sensation, even though it seemed to me at the time almostly say stupid or irrelevant. how can i sit for hours looking for one word when a whole world has been destroyed for he? and yet when i found the right word there was such deep satisfaction of doing something properly in this chaotic world. and insisting on it. and i think that for me writing this book was an act of choosing life against the temptation of despair, against the gravity of despair and grief and the book is about the wholeness of life. it's a very vital book as anyone who has read it knows it. and yet like all our life in

israel there's this strong vitality, this passion for life and this... you know, the intensity of life of individual and inner life and life of family and it's all on the ecochamber of anxiety of fear of loss and fear of death. this mixture... well, maybe this is what makes israel such an intense place. the voltage of our reality is incredible i do not feel it in any other place on earth. i wish it to be reduced a little yes? we have a little overdose of this tension, of this intensity and yet this is part of the things that make life in israel so much intriguing and so compelling and i just wish that

in my book i manage to grasp a little of this intensity. >> rose: as you try to grapple with it and put in the here and choosing words, as you say, spending hours choosing one word that captures in your own mind what it is you feel in your heart, that's the challenge, >> >> yes. >> rose: yet people raise the question when you look at sort of the invasion of the gaza did it do something to israel or not? >> inevitably it does things, inevitably and i mean if you... if all your life as a people, all our short history, 62, 63 years of israel we are con stabilityly involved in violence is we produce violence that is addressed at us, it has an effect on the country, on the

way people are approaching each other, on our self-image, on the way people are looking at us from the outside, on the amount of violence within our families, in our roads on the beaches it is there, violence is very, very present. this should be maybe the main reason to change the situation, to allow israel and the israelis to explore life of normality, life without this dead and sour feeling, this lack of hope and lack of existential confidence, all this together it creates a reality that is bad for israel, it's not good for us. we are not doing any favor to the palestinians by coming into negotiation of peace process with them. we are doing a great disservice to ourselves. >> rose: do you feel a kinship

with writers at any time in history who have been so bound up in this the state that they lived? >> rose: of course... >> of course... i think by definition. i'll give you an example. by definition writers are almost all the time in such situations, such situation of being outsiders, of being critical to their society. >> rose: that is their role. jup >> to be a built in outsider. to see the reality of your country in sympathetic eyes because it's important to be sympathetic even to the mistakes that your country does and to understand where it comes from why we are almost doomed to make this mistake.

but also to insist on the ability to change, to redeem ourselves from this situation. >> rose: i asked ask because i sometimes believe without flattering you that every... all countries need this voice and most of... many of them may have it and we know of lots of examples and they have received all kinds of accolades in terms of capturing what it is at the soul of a nation and being able to tell through fiction better than journalism or even history perhaps what is in the sharpest way the choice that has to be made for survival. >> and i think that literature can do it even better than politicians in a way and even

better than the media because when you read the book that is really facing the situation, with all the complexity of the situation suddenly you are not doomed to have a very fair political position or political opinion, you can allow yourself to be in contact with all kinds of aspects of the situation. you are more liberated. i can testify for this book when people read in the israel people from contrary ends of the political and they said this is my book and i didn't understand how is it possible and i wished that i knew the formulation, the formula so i will be able to bring these people together also in life, in reality, not only in the book.

but i think that suddenly people were able to shift very freely from their fears and hopes and ora sometimes is a very right winger and sometimes she's on the extreme left because she's a normal human being. she does not have to be entrenched in one feeling. nothing bad happens if we israelis will allow our ourselves to admit that we have inflicted evil on them for years. if we should be in contact with these feelings, we should be in contact with reality. maybe it will help to approach quicker... >> rose: to have those feelings may very well liberate you. >> i do not say we are the only one with guilty... >> rose: no one says that. >> but just... you know, to be in contact with all these feelings that we are so well trained to suppress not to know

and we are not in contact with the complexity of the situation. >> rose: didn't you say israeli has criminally wasted not only the lives its sons and daughters but also the miracle that occurred here. the miracle that occurred here. a great and rare opportunity history granted it, to create an enlightened properly function democratic state that would act in accordance with jewish and universal values. powerful language criminally wasted. >> yeah, yeah. when you have such a rare privilege to have a state of the 2,000 years we did not have a state and to be able to gather together people from 70 countries lands and to form what we have formed there, a democracy, most of the israelis came from places that never heard about democracy, they came from russia, egypt, jordan, morocco, iraq, romania and we created a democracy and revitalize it had hebrew

language. that is miracle, the language that was dormant for almost 2 years. and we created culture and agriculture and high tech and industry with all the problems and i see all the problems... >> rose: with all those problems you had this creativity at work. >> and we managed to do it and things are going wrong because of the course that israel took and i think we do not treat this opportunity that we go from history, we do not treat it with enough respect. we are not really taking responsibility for the thing that we have created there. >> rose: david grossman, thank you. >> thank you, charlie. >> rose: israel bell wilkerson is here. in 1994 she became the first african american woman to win a pulitzer prize in journalism. her new new book "the warmth of other suns" was 15 years in the making.

it chronicles one of the great untold stories of american history, the decades long migration of black citizens who fled the south for northern and western cities in search of a better life. i am very pleased to have isabel wilkerson at this table to talk about this extraordinary epic story. it's almost like if there's a great story waiting to be told sometimes there's a convergence with the perfect author to write that story and here it is in this book "the warmth of other suns." so welcome. >> thank you, great to be here. >> rose: how did you come from journalism to this? >> i grew up the daughter of people who migrated from the south to the north. you could say i've been writing it all my life. it's a story i was surrounded by this washington, d.c. where everyone around me, the parents were from south carolina, north carolina, georgia, my mother was from rome, georgia, migrated to washington, d.c. my father migrated from southern virginia to washington, d.c. different decades would never

have met had there been a great migration had they not left the south and landed in the same city. so in some ways i exist because of the great migration and i think in some ways i've been writing it all my life. however, working as a journalist and reporter and national correspondent and bureau chief for the "new york times" i had the opportunity to hear so many stories from african americans all over the country, when those stories came to me. and i began to notice in each of the different cities i might be in, in chicago and detroit and los angeles where i might be reporting if i were writing about african americans it would always come up that there was some connection to the south and the particular parts of the south were different in each city and i found that fascinating and i began to put that all together and realize that there were multiple migration streams, this is much bigger than just my experience growing up around people from north carolina and south carolina and georgia and washington, d.c. and i got so... it was quite

curious to me as to how that happened and i wanted to be able to tell the stories of how that occurred. >> rose: so you began how? collecting stories the? >> i began by first figuring out what those dreams were and then decided that i wanted to tell about this mass migration through three individual people who would represent those three major streams and then three different decades which would represent the breadth and the scope of this migration. because migration started in 1915, 1916, and world war i. and it didn't end until 1970 so it went on for a very, very long time. in some ways i view it as a kind of defection from the cast e system of the south which was known as jim crow. and so there's this outpouring of people and i needed to be able to tell it through three individuals, or wanted to tell it through three individuals that a reader could identify with, could sort of see through them the immigrant heart, is the

desire for something better, the willingness to leave for something they couldn't see in a place they'd never been to and i wanted the readers to see what it was like... >> rose: so it reads like a novel. it does. >> thank you. (laughs) >> rose: it's not the first time you've heard that. and it's the interweaving of their stories. so you've got to find three great stories. >> three great stories. >> rose: you know you want them to come from separate stream... migration streams, say, to washington or to chicago to the heartland and to california. >> correct. >> rose: how did you find them? the stories that you wanted to tell? >> what i did was i set out on a journey myself to every place that i could think of where people who might have migrated to the north might be. they'd now be up in years to so i went to senior centers, a.a.r.p. meetings, quilting clubs, catholic mass in los angeles where a lot of people are from louisiana and would be catholic. i went to baptist churches here in new york where almost

everyone is from south carolina. >> rose: right. >> i went to the... and discovered these small groups of clubs representing the states or towns in those southern states that had been... that had actually sprung up in these new cities of the north and the west and people have retained connections in some ways, gathered together and created their own clubs so that there was a a monroe, louisiana, club in los angeles. there's a lake charles, louisiana, club in los angeles. there's a greenwood, mississippi club in chicago. a greenville, mississippi, club in chicago. a brook haven and newton, mississippi, club and, of course they meet separately and have nothing to do with the others. it's just a beautiful reincarnation or a reclaiming of this... of the southern experience in these cities. >> rose: were they anxious to tell these stories or have they been reluctant to tell these stories? >> one reason i ended up talking to over 1,200 people is because

i got varying responses from where i went. one reason why the story hadn't been told in the way that it has is because a lot of people didn't talk about it after they left. when they left they left for good, they didn't look back. many people changed their names, they melted into the new world that happened to be in. they put it behind them and didn't tell their children. part of it is they didn't want their children to be burden by what they had experienced, by the pain of it. sometimes it was too difficult and heart breaking to discuss and in many ways i think they wanted to protect their children so their children could go on unfettered by whatever happened before. starting clean, starting fresh and new which is what an immigrant often does. >> rose: many people have different theories as to why the migration took place. you seem to believe most importantly it was the pain of the existence in the south. >> i really believe that in some ways it was a seeking of political asylum, in a way. there was a ridge jit caste system in the south that began

in the introduction of jim crow laws that began until "plessy v. ferguson" until the civil rights act in 1964 and 1968 and then this migration ended in the 1970s when that legislation actually began to manifest itself in the south and then and only then did the migration end and there's a little reverse. >> rose: reverse migration. going back for what reason? >> going back to the south? >> rose: yes. >> because the reasons for having left were no longer there. >> rose: but that doesn't necessarily mean you want to go back. >> no. >> rose: you can say the reason i left is because of jim crow and everything else was there and racism was there so you go somewhere. even though that changes you might find you want to stay at a new place. but clearly some people are saying "i don't want to stay in the new place, i want to go back to the old place because it's changed... >> well, what's interesting is that this migration went on for so long. you're talking about multiple

generations, at least three generations of people. it started in 1915/1916 with world war i and it didn't end until 1970. so you have multiple waves of people, multiple generations of people and most of the people that i interviewed actually had no desire to return. this reverse migration is the children and grandchildren who don't have the same recollections of the jim crow south, are not burdened by it and also are drawn by the... it's the ancestral homeland, there's a lot of curiosity, wanting to know where did you come from. any african american doing any... desiring to do genealogy, they have to go back to the south. in fact the statistics are that when the migration began at the beginning of the 20th century, 80% of all african americans were living in the south. at the end of the great migration, half were living outside of the south. this great arc from washington to new york to cleveland and detroit and chicago and over to the west coast so that was that

it was a redistribution of a good portion of an entire people population within this country. and what is happening... what happened is that those people left, they had no desire to return and the majority of the people i interviewed moved for good and in some ways the word migration is not an accurate term for this it's come to be the term we think of but migration often suggests a back and forth. these people left for good and didn't look back often and had no desire to return. one of the things that i would hear over and over again in one form or the other is that we might have made many mistakes but leaving the south was not one of them given the way that the south was at the time. >> rose: and what was the reception in the north? >> the reception in the north was a difficult one. the reception in the north was at times almost as hostile as it might have been before. however... >> rose: because they were taking jobstor color of their skin? >> multiple reasons. when they arrived they arrived as essentially people of the land or small towns in the

south. they were often resented because they did not fit in initially. they were cordoned off into these roped off narrow bands of land often near industrial places, often in the shadow of downtown. they could not really spread out they were in tremendous overcrowding situations. there's an example of it was so overcrowded in some of these places that there were actual time shares... there was actually rotation of a bed. in other words, the day shift person would have to come and tap on the the shoulder of the person in this bed and say "i'm back from my shift, you've got to get up, i need to sleep." it gives a whole new meaning to the word "timeshare." >> rose: why did it take so long for this story to be told? >> well, it took me 15 years. >> rose: i know. (laughs) >> it would take anyone probably a very long time. >> rose: who's waiting for the right storyteller, maybe one answer. >> well, that's very nice of you to say.

i think that sometimes with the benefit of hindsight you can connect dots in a way you couldn't before. when the migration first began it was a prepreserve in some ways of sociologists and economists who were trying to figure out what does this mean. primarily sociologists and economists in the north are trying to figure out what is this going to mean for us to have all these large... overcrowding, health concerns, the conditions of the children who were arriving in the north. and so it ended up being described sort of as a problem and i think that the human factor kind of got lost in the focus on the worries about the structural concerns of what was going to happen with all these people here. >> rose: why did it take you 15 years. >> well, it took me 15 years. probably because that's been two years of looking for these three main protagonists and i went to these senior centers... >> rose: and what would you say? "hello, i'm isabel and i'm finding somebody who's going to be the principal character in me telling one of the great stories

of america, the migration to the north"? >> that would have been a good thing to say. (laughs) >> rose: what did you say? (laughs) "hello, i'm here, tell me your story." >> i was very open and i said if you migrated from these states-- depending on the city i was in-- during these years and then you were part of the great migration i'd like to talk to you for a book i'm writing. >> rose: did most people respond? >> many people were willing to come up and tell the stories, the issue, though, is i was looking for three individuals who would have certain qualities that were important for a narrative of this type. first of all, they needed to be the people who actually did the moving, that made the decision. i was looking for decision makers. i had a lot of children who would tell their stories. i ran into a woman who was born on the train from texas to california. neither she nor her mother could make it to california before her arrival. i heard lots of wonderful stories like that but i needed the people who were making the decision. i wanted to understand what was it they were living under while they were in the south. >> rose: what was the fear? >> what was the fear?

what was the impetus, the precipitating factor? how did they make the decision to leave? what were the fears and concerns that they had as they had to think about leaving the only place they'd ever known, mother, father, grandparents, the land, all of that. i wanted to find out what was it like to leave and what was the journey itself like. and then what happened once they arrived, how did they get situated and settled? did they ever wonder whether they made the right decision? i wanted to understand the human heart, the immigrant heart, the decision making and the inside views. >> rose: let's talk about the people we have photographed. the first is george sterling and rubin blooig of florida packing house. tell me who they are. >> george starling was a young man in central florida, he had gone to college but had to drop out because at that time the family couldn't afford to keep sending him and there was no school in his actual vicinity that he could go to because they were segregated.

he returned to the primary work of the people around him which was it is citrus picking. he discovered that the work was very dangerous. they had to climb into 40-foot trees in order to extract the fruit from the trees. they haded to splice together ladders in order to get up there. people would fall from the tree, break a limb, there was no workmen's compensation or anything so it was bad luck out of luck. the work was dangerous and the pay was bors and he began-- because this is during world war ii now, the mid-'40s-- he began along with ruben bligh and some others agitate for higher wages. the grove owners did not take well to that and he ended up having to flee for his life and he headed to harlem in 1945. >> rose: next we have a picture of george starling as a young man. there he is. >> yes, that's him at the time when he was... would have been picking fruit and a young man with the future and lots of dreams but kind of stuck in the

system that he was in. >> rose: next is ida me a gladney. >> ida mae gladney was a share crap croper's wife who was terrible at picking cotton. i love that. i never thought about anything being good or bad. >> rose: did she want to take you back and show you what picking cotton was about? >> i spent enough time with her and her family and they entrusted me to take her back. i decided to take her back to around the same time she left, which was in autumn around this time. and we were driving down a road in chickasaw county where she was from, chickasaw county, mississippi, and we came upon a field of cotton. i actually had not seen cotton growing because it wasn't in my background and it looked kind of interesting to me, beautiful actually, to see. and she got raetly excited about it and she said "well, let's stop and go out in the cotton field and let's pick up some. >> rose: there's the next picture of her looking at the cotton. >> she wanted to jump out of the car. she hated picking cotton when

she had to but now that she didn't have to she seemed to be... couldn't wait to get out here. and i said "are you sure we can do this?" first of all, the field belonged to somebody and secondly this is mississippi. i mean, is this... and she said "oh, they're not going to care what little bit we pick. >> rose: next is dr. robert foster in los angeles. this is the west coast end of the migration. yes. dr. foster was a surgeon in the army during the korean war. when he got out of the army it turned out that he went back to monroe, louisiana, where he could not practice surgery or track f.i.s. medicine and he decided he would set out on a course for california where he thought he would be able to. the journey ended up being far more perilous than he intended or expected and that was because it turned out the reach of jim crow or segregation extended beyond the boundaries he anticipated. and he found that he had to drive for several states without being able to stop. he was not able to find a place that would commit him a room. and i attempted to recreate that

journey. >> rose: all of them died before the book was published. >> yes. >> rose: what did they see? >> they didn't see anything except my heart felt interest in their story. i spent many, many, many, many hundreds of hours of each of them and i went to all kinds of places with them i went to reunions with them, dr. foster i went... i dropped him off at the racetrack once at the whole other story because he became an inveterate gambler when he got to california. he's a character uo himself. i communicated to them and they trusted me with this these incredible stories. i feel so honored and grateful to have been able to hear them. >> rose: how would history have been different if this migration hadn't taken place? >> it's so hard to calculate in so many ways.

on the one hand, this was a redistribution of an entire people. the majority of african americans that you meet in the midwest and the west are descendants of this great migration, that's how huge it is just in terms of the number. >> rose: and fathers and mothers of great american artists and an extraordinary range of people that we've come to know. >> when it comes to literature. toni morrison, august wilson, richard wright, the big names... almost every big name you can think of in literature... >> rose: musicians like miles davis. >> miles davis, his parents migrated from arkansas to illinois where he had the luxury of being able to play the... play music which he never would have been able toll do in cotton country of arkansas. they will loanus monk his parents migrated from north carolina to harlem when he was five years old. he had the luxury of being able to practice his genius, the creativity of his music that he would not likely have had. had he been growing up poor in

tobacco company of north carolina and the same goes for john coltraine who migrated when he was 17 to philadelphia which is also part of the... one of the routes of the great migration and it was in philadelphia he got his first alto sax. it's hard to imagine what would culture be like, what would music be like without john coltraine had he not gotten that alto sax. >> rose: then there's richard wright. >> richard wright migrated from natchez, mississippi, where he was the son of a sharecroper to chicago via memphis and basically devoted his entire writing life to trying to understand what he'd experienced in the south and this great migration. he wrote about in the almost everything that he did. >> rose: read that for me. this is what's in the beginning of the book. >> this is the epigraph. "i was leaving the south to fling myself into the unmoan. i was taking a part of the south to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of

other suns and perhaps to bloom." >> rose: and so when someone comes to you and says "what story have you told and what's the significance of it" you say? >> i say that have thought to tell i know one of the great underreported stories of the 20th century about a massive internal migration that occurred within the borders of our own country and change the culture as we know it from music to literature to sports and politics and that this migration was similar in so many ways to how the whole country got populated. in other words people were leaving for the same reasons... >> rose: from all over the world. >> all over the world. >> rose: i just want to tell one story you told me. you walked in here and you said henderson, north korean, my hometown. and you said "i know your hometown. now i'm a son of the south who

loves his life and loves where he lives and is part of this community that i live in more than anything but never forgets its roots and you know where i came from. >> i know where you came from. it was an accidental discovery. it's part of the migration story. i had to move my parents from washington, d.c. to atlanta where i was leaving to complete this book and on the way my father got very ill. very, very ill. gravely ill and we had to pull over and we happened to be in henderson, north carolina. and, you know, i was panicked, the ambulance arrived, took him to this hospital where he was treated like a king. now why that was so significant was because my parents had been raised in the south and had come to look upon it as exile, never wanted to return. they actually had not wanted to return it at all. they resisted all along the way and i said... i scooped them up and said you must go because my father was ill and my mother had been ill, too. so it was an eye-opening experience to be there having to

depend upon people in the region that they had grown up to begin to fear and to be... to have his life in the hands of people that he had feared and to have them treat him like a king-- literally calling him "honey and baby and sweetie." and it was absolutely one of the best experience wes ever had. in fact, i was able to talk with him more about his experiences in the south. it helped to revive all these experiences about our own family. we have the best time. who would ever have expected that in a hospital? they treated us beautifully, we hated to leave in a way. and then we were headed on our way back to atlanta and one of the things that i found and discovered about this is that this migration was in some ways a transfer of southern culture from the south to the north. one of the unrecognized aspects of this migration is that it allowed the beauty of southern culture-- the music, the language, the lyricism of the

words-- to be transferred by these people. they were not just carrying themselves, they were carrying their music and the language, the gospel, the spirituals and the values. the family values. >> rose: and the story telling ability. >> and the story telling ability with them. so that actually survived. they may not have told the stories about the caste system and the harshness they had to live under, but they brought... they were aa bridge between cultures and that culture, when we talk about jazz and we talk about rhythm and blues and we talk about the literature that we speak of, the cycle of plays by august wilson, we're actually talking about the transfer of southern culture married with the metabolism of the north and creating whole new art forms that now are being enjoyed by people around the world. that's a beautiful thing. it's a beautiful thing. >> it's extraordinary. i mean, you go back and look at the deep roots of so much music and story telling and there it is. and to hear the story of... my

heart feels so touched and the hospital where my father as a very successful businessman used to volunteer because he had such love for the responsibility of the community in his later years. so thank you for telling that story and you and i also share a great editor, kate medina. >> yes. yes, she and i decided that... i got a question all the time about why there are no pictures in the book and we both agreed that there should be none because we wanted the reader to see him or herself in these people. >> rose: thank you. >> thank you. >> rose: "the warmth of other suns" the epic story of america's great migration. isabel wilkerson. captioning sponsored by rose communications captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org