Martin Luther King's birthday...

...came and went yesterday without my recommending (again) the best book I've read in years, The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson. It's essentially about the Great Migration of black Americans from the South to the North between about 1917 and the 1970s. But it's also about the horrific conditions in which African Americans lived in the Jim Crow South after the Civil War. It reminded me a lot of the reign of terror that Jews experienced in Nazi Germany -- except that the American version went on for a hundred years. (And that was after centuries of brutal slavery.)

If you're white and grew up in the northern suburbs, like me, you're probably only vaguely aware of the horrible experience that black Americans have had. But if, again like me, you have relatives who say things like, "The Irish had it pretty bad, too," then you need to read this book. You really need to read this book. Because, no matter who you are, your family's history was nothing like this.

My ancestors, for example, were not brought to this country against their will -- in chains -- and forced to do hard manual labor for hundreds of years without pay. (And that was before the nightmare of Jim Crow.) They weren't bought and sold, their families weren't broken up at whim and they weren't kept intentionally illiterate and without marketable skills. However hard my ancestors had it (and I'm sure I would cry like a baby if I had to spend even one day in their shoes), they were able to ultimately blend in to the general population, get jobs somehow and achieve a decent existence. And, after a few generations or so, their descendants were able to advance into the middle class.

Oh, and they never had to fear that a lynch mob -- with the tacit approval, and sometimes participation, of the police -- would come to their house at night and capriciously seize and kill (and sometimes torture) someone in their family. For the most part, my ancestors were protected by the law. In the South, there really were no laws protecting blacks.

When I began reading this book I thought to myself, "Every black American should read this." And then, after I was about a third of the way through it I said, "Every American should read this book."

(And, by the way, it's very readable; not something you have to slog through. Everyone to whom I've recommended it has thanked me.)

The Warmth of Other Suns changed the way I look at African Americans. I will never think of them the same way again. Quite honestly -- and I'm going to take a risk by saying this -- after what they've been through I don't know how any black person could not hate white people. Really.

Again, this book changed my life. Read it.