Why have we made so little progress?

Sometimes it's reassuring, but often times very sad, that the strains of history repeat themselves in ways that show how little we've learned. From 1915 to 1970, the internal exodus of almost six million African Americans from the South changed the face of America. For her award winning book The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, Isabel Wilkerson interviewed more than a thousand people to tell the dramatic story of how this American journey unfolded. What happens to one the three central characters in 1945 Florida, shockingly parallels the recent killing of Trayvon Martin.

My conversation with Isabel Wilkerson:

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America's Great Migration

Every so often a books comes along that reminds us of why narrative history matters. Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson has given us such a book in The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration. She gives us a deeply personal tale of one of the great underreported stories of the 20th century: the migration of African-Americans from the Jim Crow South to the cities of the North, West and Midwest. To understand this story is to finally come to grips with race, power, politics, religion and class in our contemporary society.

My conversation with Isabel Wilkerson:

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