The Books Briefing: What Happens When You Lose the Place You Come From

In our latest cover story, Vann R. Newkirk II details how 1 million black families were forced off their farmland, a loss that translates to about $3.7 billion to $6.6 billion in today’s dollars. The black women whose stories are documented in Saidiya Hartman’s book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments quietly became models of personal liberation during the Great Migration, amid a larger struggle for women to live as they pleased. Isabel Wilkerson writes a wider chronicle of black families’ exodus from the South after emancipation in her indispensable work The Warmth of Other Suns, which approaches the period’s history through the biographies of actual migrants.