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That's one of the biggest losses, I think, to African American families, is that people, once they left, they turned away from the South. They didn't look back, and they often didn't tell their children about it. They didn't want to talk about it. It was too painful, what they'd gone through and the caste system of the South, which was Jim Crow.

Isabel Wilkerson

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Isabel Wilkerson
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: January 1
Author
Journalist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Left
Turned
Caste
Think
Tell
South
Castes
Thinking
Away
Loss
Losses
People
Didn
System
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Back
Gone
African
Look
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Families
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Children

More quotes by Isabel Wilkerson

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[The Great Migration] had such an effect on almost every aspect of our lives - from the music that we listen to to the politics of our country to the ways the cities even look and feel.
Isabel Wilkerson
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Many immigrants do not talk about what they endured back home. They were fleeing that world, and when they left they didn't want to talk about it because there had been pain and heartbreak under the caste system of the South. They didn't want to burden their children with what they had endured.
Isabel Wilkerson
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Miles Davis, his parents migrated from Arkansas to Illinois, where he had the luxury of being able to practice for hours upon hours. He never would have been able to do that in the cotton country of Arkansas.
Isabel Wilkerson
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The suburbanization and the ghettos that were created as a result of the limits of where [African-Americans] could live in the North [still exist today.] And ... the South was forced to change, in part because they were losing such a large part of their workforce through the Great Migration.
Isabel Wilkerson
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Anything that could be conceived of that would separate black people from white people was devised and codified by someone in some state in the South. There were colored and white waiting rooms everywhere, from doctor's offices to the bus stations, as people may already know.
Isabel Wilkerson
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I mean my mother migrated from Georgia -Rome, Georgia, to Washington, D.C., where she then met my father, who was a Tuskegee Airman who was from Southern Virginia. They migrated to Washington and I wouldn't even exist if it were not for that migration. And I brought her back to Georgia, both my parents, actually.
Isabel Wilkerson