UNIVERSITY PARK — Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and author Isabel Wilkerson emphasized the importance of a journalist’s devotion to a story Tuesday night.
“Most people are accustomed to sitting with a reporter for a half hour, but putting in time through experience is the way to get the story right,” she said.
Wilkerson, a former New York Times correspondent, was the first black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in the history of American journalism and the first black to win for individual reporting. Her acclaimed book, “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration,” landed at No. 11 on The New York Times best sellers list.
For “The Warmth of Other Suns,” Wilkerson spent 15 years of researching archives and interviewing more than 1,200 blacks to illustrate the human experiences of those who made the migration from the South to the northern and western cities in the United States between 1915 and 1970.
Wilkerson said Tuesday night, “The idea of this book was building all my life because I am actually a child of this migration.”
She described her work as a narrative non-fiction, which is an attempt to bring the reader into what is being written. She showed this by reading excerpts from her story that goes in depth to the lives of evacuees in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
“We want to show the reader what it is like to be in the midst of that,” she said. “At the end of the day, people always want to hear a story.”
Wilkerson said that the stories within “The Warmth of Other Suns” represent one of the greatest under-reported stories of the 20th century.
“People never talked about it,” she said. “While I was raised by people who were a part of this migration, they never talked about it and as a journalist I wanted to know the story.”
The book is about the greatest internal migration within the borders of the United States’ history because blacks wanted to escape a modern day caste system.
“Every aspect of their lives was constrained by these systems,” she said.
Wilkerson, who spoke at HUB Heritage Hall as part of the Foster- Foreman Conference for Distinguished Writers, said she used the interviewing process for her book as a casting call to narrow it down to three main protagonists to represent the various migration streams.
She said the enormous amount of time spent with her three subjects enabled her to get to know them better and give the reader a better knowledge of their experience in the book.
“You get a deeper, richer, more authoritative story because you’ve lived it and seen it with them,” she said.
Bray is a Penn State journalism student.
