I wondered if this book might have been the first time his children, and grandchildren, had ever heard his stories. He wanted to shield them from that, and not taint their California prosperity with memories of segregation and oppression. Foster hardly ever told his children about his early years in segregated Louisiana and his escape from it. But it struck me when Wilkerson wrote how Dr. In L.A., he achieved wealth and esteem, becoming Ray Charles’s physician and a sharply dressed habitué of Las Vegas casinos and California horse tracks.

Army during the Korean War, married into a prominent academic family from Atlanta, then drove cross-country to set up a private practice in Los Angeles. Foster grew up in rural Monroe, La., attended Morehouse College, went to medical school, served as a doctor in the U.S. This reminded me of Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, one of the three Black Americans who emigrated from the Jim Crow South in the mid-20th century to seek a better life elsewhere in the United States whom Wilkerson interviewed extensively for this book.

But if we understand the world our fathers came from and the families our fathers came from, it is less frustrating. Sometimes the advice and concerns that fathers express are puzzling and make no sense. If you understand your father better, you understand yourself better. In preparing to write about Isabel Wilkerson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction work about the Great Migration, I stumbled across this article about fathers and what we know about their lives. I hope all the dads out there are having a great day.

Under the warmth of other suns