Isabel Wilkerson: How Did The Great Migration Change The Course Of Human History?

Part 2 of the TED Radio Hour episode Migration

During the Great Migration, almost six million Black Americans moved across the U.S., changing the course of American history. Isabel Wilkerson shares what we can learn from these migration stories.

About Isabel Wilkerson

Isabel Wilkerson is a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and writer. She is the author of the critically-acclaimed book The Warmth of Other Suns, which tells the story of the Great Migration. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Heartland Prize for Nonfiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Award for Nonfiction, the Lynton History Prize from Harvard and Columbia universities, and the Stephen Ambrose Oral History Prize. She is also the author of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.

Wilkerson won the Pulitzer Prize for her work as Chicago Bureau Chief of The New York Times in 1994, making her the first Black woman in the history of American journalism to win a Pulitzer and the first African-American to win for individual reporting. In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded her the National Humanities Medal. She has taught at Princeton, Emory, and Boston Universities and has lectured at more than two hundred other colleges and universities across the United States and in Europe and Asia.

She is a graduate of Howard University. [Copyright 2021 NPR]