You must leave this world a better place than it would have been if you had not existed.

- Isabel Wilkerson

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 Sout…

- Isabel Wilkerson

My parents absolutely did not think of themselves as part of the Great Migration. They knew they were part of a great wave. No one really talked abou…

- Isabel Wilkerson

America is made up of people who came from someplace else. Even the Native Americans came over the Bering strait... America is what it is because peo…

- Isabel Wilkerson

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 tod…

- Isabel Wilkerson

And in some ways, to me, that's one of the inspiring and powerful things about the Great Migration itself. There was no leader, there was no one pers…

- Isabel Wilkerson

It was illegal for black people and white people to play checkers together in Birmingham. And there were even black and white Bibles to swear to tell…

- Isabel Wilkerson

Well, I'm a daughter of the great migration as, really, the majority of African Americans that you meet in the north and west are products of the gre…

- Isabel Wilkerson

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…

- Isabel Wilkerson