As soon as you pick up this book - from the black and white picture on the cover to the very weight of it - you get the sense that it's going to be epic. Wilkerson put an astounding amount of research into this book about the "Great Migration" of African-Americans from the South to the North between 1915 and 1970. The important, thought-provoking, inspiring and at times, heartbreaking story she shares comes out of more than 1200 interviews, including hundreds of hours with the three individuals around whom the book revolves. Those three cases - of two men and one woman from different origin and destination states and different periods of the migration - are explored to such a degree that it feels like watching a movie of their lives.

Compared to the era of the Underground Railway, the facts and dimensions of post-Reconstruction South to North migration are not well known or understood, and this book aims to fix that. I learned a lot of interesting information about measures in the South to try to prevent people from leaving, the factors that entered into decisions about whether and where to go, and the way migrants were received in their new communities by those who already lived there, white and black. There's also a lot in the book that helps us understand how today's racial housing segregation in the North, and persistent racial economic inequality, is linked to the racist labour and housing policies happening during the Great Migration.