NPR and Michel Martin's Tell Me More: Lessons In Dignity: A Cry Out for Justice

Above, below: Tunisian students shout during a demonstration in solidarity with Egyptian protesters in Tunis. A popular revolt in

Tunisia forced President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to flee the country. And members of the Great Migration, Chicago, 1918 [Chicago

History Museum/Getty Images].

I have been, like most people, following news of the street protests and unrest in the Middle East. And it may seem strange, but my mind keeps going back to a book I read last summer by the great former New York Times reporter Isabel Wilkerson. It is called The Warmth of Other Suns and it is about the so-called Great Migration.

It details the mass movement of millions of blacks from the rural Southern United States to the North, Midwest and West in the decades following the first World War, up until the beginning of the 1960s.

What would one have to do with the other?

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