Our Racial Moment of Truth

Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson is author of The Warmth of Other Suns, the New York Times bestseller that tells the true story of three people who made the decision of their lives during the Great Migration, a watershed in American history. The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, and it made national news when President Obama chose the book for summer reading in 2011. In 2012, The New York Times Magazine named The Warmth of Other Suns to its list of the best nonfiction books of all time. Wilkerson spent 15 years working on The Warmth of Other Suns, interviewing more than 1,200 people to tell what she calls one of the greatest underreported stories of the 20th Century.

A gifted storyteller, Wilkerson captivates audiences with the universal human story of migration and reinvention, and examines what we can glean from the Great Migration to better inform present-day racial issues. In her lectures she expertly explores the need for a modern reconstruction to help reconcile America’s troubled racial past. With the high-profile killings of unarmed African-Americans at the hands of police and civilians, many people are asking just how far have we really come since the days of Jim Crow – and the need for dialogue has never been greater. Wilkerson’s talk will address the persistence of racial injustice as a national challenge and what history can teach us as we work to resolve it.