Isabel Wilkerson to Give Middlebury College Commencement Address

Middlebury
Commencement
Sunday, May 27
10 a.m., Main Quad
National Humanities me
dalist, Wilkerson spent 15 years working on her book, interviewing more than 1,200 people to tell one of the greatest underreported stories of the 20th century, that of the Great Migration. From 1915 to 1970, six million African-Americans fled the Jim Crow South in what became one of the largest internal migrations in United States history and one that permanently changed the social landscape of the country.
Published in 2010, The Warmth of Other Suns won numerous prizes, including the National Book Critics Circle Award. Wilkerson’s book was also named to more than 30 best-of-the-year lists, including the New York Times’ 10 Best Books of the Year and Amazon’s 5 Best Books of the Year.
Wilkerson won the Pulitzer Prize for her work as Chicago bureau chief of the New York Times in 1994, making her the first black woman in the history of American journalism to win a Pulitzer Prize and the first African American to win for individual reporting.
She has also taught at a number of universities, including Emory, Princeton, and Columbia.