Isabel Wilkerson in conversation with Stephen Smith about 'The Warmth of Other Suns'
Award-winning journalist and author Isabel Wilkerson was the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize. She was recognized for her work at The New York Times covering the 1993 Midwest floods.
Wilkerson also spent 15 years researching one of the most underreported stories of the 20th century: the migration over six decades of some six million AfricanAmerican southerners, from the south to the industrial north and west.
Wilkerson interviewed more than 1,200 people, racing against the clock to reach as many of the original migrants as she could before it was too late. Her own parents were part of that great migration, moving from Georgia and southern Virginia to Washington, D.C. where she was born and raised.
Her book "The Warmth of Other Suns" tells this story. When it came out in 2011, Wilkerson joined MPR's Stephen Smith at the University of St. Thomas for MPR’s Broadcast Journalist Series.
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