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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.

Pull its her 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.

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 six million African Americans from the south to the north of the United States.

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.

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 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 Being.

The warmth of other sons is remarkably the first comprehensive popular history of the Great Migration.

It's told through the lens of three ordinary lives and three succeeding generations.

Ida Mae 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 Isabelle Wilkerson at the 2016 Faith and Literature Festival at the University of North Carolina, Asheville.

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