Isabel Wilkerson

Isabel Wilkerson (born 1961, Washington, D.C., U.S.) has chronicled the lives of unsung African Americans and has exposed deeply embedded systems of social injustice in her reporting for The New York Times and in her celebrated works of nonfiction: Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020) and The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (2010). She was the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for journalism (1994).

Early life and education

Wilkerson grew up in Washington, D.C., the daughter of parents who had migrated to the city from smaller Southern communities. Her mother was originally from Rome, Georgia; her father was from Virginia and served in World War II as a Tuskegee Airman. Her parents met in Washington when they were both students at Howard University. Wilkerson attended a local grade school with many white students, an experience that planted the seeds of her later work on the Great Migration—the widespread migration of African Americans in the 20th century from rural communities in the South to large cities in the North and West. As an adult, Wilkerson recalled that many of her classmates had shared stories of their European ancestors who had come to the United States as immigrants, and she came to realize that she was also the daughter of immigrants, because her parents had been part of the Great Migration. As she told Time magazine in 2010, “On St. Patrick’s Day, when people would talk about their immigrant past, I believed I didn’t have any stories to tell. My forbears had been in the U.S. for centuries. Yet, it turns out that African Americans indeed have a story of migration in this country.”

Wilkerson started her career in journalism as an editor of her high-school newspaper. After graduating, she attended Howard University, where she rose through the ranks of the university’s newspaper, The Hilltop, to become editor in chief. While in college, she participated in a number of editorial internships, including stints at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.

(Read W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1926 Britannica essay on African American literature.)

Journalism career and Pulitzer Prize

After graduating college in 1983, Wilkerson worked as a reporter at the Detroit Free Press before joining The New York Times a year later as a metropolitan reporter. In 1986 she was made a national correspondent at the Times, and in 1991 she was promoted to Chicago bureau chief. In this role, she built a reputation as a keen investigator of racial, class, and gender disparities in Midwestern communities. Some of her memorable and diverse reporting included articles on the representation of Black characters on television, initiatives to improve Chicago’s public school system, the movement for a statewide universal health care plan in Minnesota, the drive-in movie theaters of Nebraska, Michigan’s controversial assisted-suicide law, the experiences of several Chicago women with the welfare system, and the crack epidemic in urban communities. In 1993 Wilkerson wrote two landmark articles on the impact that major flooding of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers that year had on towns throughout the Midwest. She also published an empathetic profile of a 10-year-old boy living in poverty on the South Side of Chicago. For these three articles, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing, becoming the first African American woman to win a Pulitzer in journalism. It was also the first time in the history of the Pulitzer that an African American journalist received a prize for individual reporting.

In the mid-1990s, while reporting for The New York Times, Wilkerson traveled to South Africa, where her coverage included features on the daily lives of domestic workers and the removal of monuments related to country’s era of apartheid. She also contributed articles on American events such as Hurricane Katrina and occasional book reviews.

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(Read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Britannica essay on “Monuments of Hope.”)

The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste

In 1998 Wilkerson was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, which she used to fund research for her first book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (2010). Taking its title from a poem by Richard Wright, an African American writer who had fled the Jim Crow South for Chicago in the early 20th century, the book follows the individual journeys of three different people: a sharecropper’s wife who migrated from Mississippi to Chicago, a citrus fruit picker in Florida who moved to New York City, and a surgeon in Louisiana who journeyed to Los Angeles. The experience of Wilkerson’s parents provided her with personal insight into the history of the Great Migration, but she also interviewed more than 1,200 people to identify her book’s main subjects and spent 15 years conducting research. To research and write the book, Wilkerson took a leave of absence from The New York Times and moved from the Midwest to Atlanta.

A national bestseller, The Warmth of Other Suns was likened by critics to Alex Haley’s 1976 multigenerational saga Roots and hailed as a groundbreaking work that shed light on a significant event that had not been told through the experiences of individual migrants. As Wilkerson told Time in 2010, “Many Americans, and most African Americans in the North and West, owe their existence to the fact that the Great Migration occurred. My parents’ friends and neighbors were all from the South. It was such a fact of life that no one ever talked about it. That’s why the story hadn’t been told.” Among the many awards the book received was the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2010. In 2015 Wilkerson was awarded a National Humanities Medal for “championing the stories of an unsung history.”

Wilkerson’s idea for her next book emerged while working on The Warmth of Other Suns. Titled Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, her second book was published in 2020 as a commentary on social hierarchies in the United States that she described as a caste system. Wilkerson argued that racism is not an adequate word to describe the deeply entrenched inequities that face Black Americans. Instead, her book draws connections between systemic injustice in the United States and the genocidal system of the Third Reich in Nazi Germany and the caste system that persists in India. According to Wilkerson:

Caste…predates the notion of race and has survived the era of formal state-sponsored racism long officially practiced in the mainstream. The modern-day version of easily deniable racism may be able to cloak the invisible structure that created and maintains hierarchy and inequality. But caste does not allow us to ignore structure. Caste is structure. Caste is ranking. Caste is the boundaries that reinforce the fixed assignments based upon what people look like. Caste is a living, breathing entity. It is like a corporation that seeks to sustain itself at all costs. To achieve a truly egalitarian world requires looking deeper than what we think we see.

Among the topics and issues that Caste explores are where people of color who are not Black fit into the American caste system, the origin of the term Caucasian, how the United States used immigration as a way to legally maintain the country’s caste system, the Third Reich’s study of Jim Crow laws in the United States, and America’s “one-drop rule,” which maintains that a person with any known African ancestry is classified as Black. Caste was another bestseller for Wilkerson and a finalist for numerous national book awards. Wilkerson’s professional and personal experiences researching and writing the book were the subject of a feature film by Ava DuVernay, Origin, released in 2023.