Wilkerson rescues and presents a crucial piece of 20th century history in a way both thorough and engaging. The backbone of the book is a braid of three biographies she has selected from a wider range of interviews and sources, well footnoted throughout for anyone who wants to inspect the receipts or to step further. The book succeeds on the strength of those biographies alone, but goes much further, lifting up the lives of all who participated in the Great Migration, telling again the timeless story of perserverance in the face of hardship and injustice, made new through the particulars. This centers the essential human story from the Jim Crow years in a way that a focus on Jim Crow never could. This reviewer learned the white-centered counterparts to this story, one of "forced bussing" and "white flight" and government "meddling", and found this not just a welcome correction, but as if something mean and twisted and inscrutably half-told finally made sense, as if the missing pieces, the things left unsaid and the lies told to cover the holes, had been filled in.