Author and Pulitzer Prize recipient, Isabel Wilkerson, was the featured presenter at the Winnetka campus Monday for the Martin Luther King Jr. Seminar Day.
New Trier’s decision to hold classes on the holiday made waves throughout the school. While it was not the typical attendance day, students instead ran through four sessions including a presentation by one of the two featured speakers.
Pat Savage-Williams, New Trier Special Ed Coordinator and leader of professional development for staff on issues of equity and diversity, was one of the leaders in the planning of the seminar day.
The goals of the day were to “help students further develop a positive racial identity and a deeper understanding of other racial identities, and to understand the impact of systemic racism and how one can counteract its influence,” said Savage-Williams.
One way of reaching these goals was by providing a special presentation by two influential speakers at both campuses. Ilyasah Shabazz, the daughter of Malcolm X, was at the Northfield campus, while Wilkerson presented at Winnetka.
The process of selecting the speakers was extensive. A committee comprised of members of New Trier staff and the student body was assembled to make the selections. Savage-Williams said, “We wanted the keynote speakers for MLK Day to be someone widely known who could speak to the issues of race– both historically and currently.”
Wilkerson is a nationally acclaimed author and journalist. She is the first black woman in the history of American journalism to win the Pulitzer Prize and the first African American to win for individual reporting.
She has worked as a Professor of Journalism at Emory University, Princeton University, and Boston University. Wilkerson was also a lecturer at Northwestern University, and she served as a board member of the National Arts in Journalism Program at Columbia University.
Her book, “The Warmth of Other Suns,” is a New York Times best-seller. It tells the story of the Great Migration, following three African Americans and their journeys as they flee the south in the 20th century and head north and west to what is called the “New World.”
In the early 1900s, 90% of all black Americans were living in the South. After the Great Migration, nearly 47% were living outside the South, according to Wilkerson’s book.
Around six million blacks left the south during that time. “The Great Migration is not purely about the numbers but about the lasting effects of so many people uprooting themselves and transporting their culture from an isolated region of the country to the big cities of the North and West,” Wilkerson said.
“Warmth” won numerous awards and honors, including the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and the New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 2010. In 2011, President Obama selected “The Warmth of Other Suns” as one of the books for his summer reading during his vacation at Martha’s Vineyard.
The Great Migration can be compared to other immigrant migrations in the sense that there is loss and sacrifice in the journey to a foreign land. However, the Great Migration is unique in that the African Americans were technically already American citizens, forced to leave their homes to claim their piece of the American Dream.
Wilkerson’s journalism skills were amplified during her research for the novel. Over a period of 18 months, she conducted interviews with over 1,200 people before she found Ida Mae, George Starling, and Robert Foster, the three protagonists.
Wilkerson made several appearances on national television programs, including 60 Minutes on CBS and the Nightly News on NBC.