Poetry has become as important to me as any reading and contemplating I do, which is why I'm always eager to remind you about our ongoing initiative, the Poetry Radial Project.

It's a place where you can discover the poetry that so many of our guests fold into their lives, and you can also delve deep into reading and listening to the many wonderful poets we've had on the show.

Check out one of my favorites, David White, Red for us. Everything is waiting for you. You'll also find Naomi Shehap-Nai, John O'Donohue, Lailie Long Soldier, and many, many more. All that at onbearing.org slash poetry.

Support for onbearing with Christa Tippett comes from the Fetzer Institute, helping build the spiritual foundation for a loving world. Fetzer envisions a world that embraces love as a guiding principle and animating force for our lives, a powerful love that helps us live in sacred relationship with ourselves, others, and the natural world. Learn more by visiting Fetzer.org.

You go to the doctor for anything, and they won't begin to treat you without taking your history, and not just yours, but that of your parents and grandparents before you.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Isabel Wilkerson, points this out as she reflects on her epic book, The Warmth of Other Sons.

It's a carrier of histories, stories, truths that help make sense of human and social challenges newly visible at the heart of our life together.

Isabel Wilkerson has also become an unexpected voice on the enduring human drama of refugees and immigration.

She is herself a product of one of the most under-reported stories of the 20th century, which she chronicles, the Exodus or Great Migration, of 6 million African Americans from the south to the north of the United States.

You know, our country is like a really old house. I love old houses. I've always lived in old houses, but old houses need a lot of work, and the work is never done.

And just when you think you've finished one renovation, it's time to do something else. Something else has gone wrong. And that's what our country is like, and you may not want to go into that basement.

But if you really don't go into that basement, it's your own peril.

And I think that whatever you are ignoring is not going to go away.

Whatever you're ignoring is only going to get worse. Whatever you're ignoring will be there to be reckoned with until you reckon with it.

And I think that that's what we're called upon to do where we are right now.

I'm Christa Tippett, and this is on Beeing.

Israel Wilkerson won the Pulitzer Prize for her work as Chicago Bureau Chief of the New York Times, and is the recipient of the National Humanities Medal.

The Great Migration gave the world a bounty of brilliance, from Michelle Obama and James Baldwin to Diana Ross and John Coltrine, while also planting harder foundations that continue to touch on every American in some way.

The warmth of other sons traces this story through the lens of three ordinary lives in three succeeding generations.

Ida May Branden, Gladney, who moved from Mississippi to Chicago in the 1930s, George Swanson Starling, from Florida to New York in the 1940s, and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, who went from Louisiana to California in the 1950s.

I interviewed Isabel Wilkerson at the 2016 Faith and Literature Festival at the University of North Carolina, Asheville.

You yourself are a child of this great migration.

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