beautiful social narrative history of a part of American history I knew nothing about 
 from pre-world war I to the 1970's, the migration of millions of black Americans from Jim Crow southern states with legal formal discrimination and segregation to purportedly free northern states with ingrained social segregation and ghettos 
 told through the lives of three migrants, driven by fear and hope for themselves and their children 
 Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate 
 smart, ambitious George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida orange groves for New York, he risked his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God; 
 and the upwardly mobile Dr Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career including being the personal physician to Ray Charles - achieving desired social status in California