Dee Rees, Shondaland To Bring Historical TV Drama Based On Black Migration Book ‘Warmth Of Other Suns’ To FX

Dee Rees is developing a limited tv drama series on FX channel, according to the latest report from Variety. The historical drama, which will be produced by Shonda Rhimes’ production company Shondaland, is based on the book The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by African American writer and professor Isabel Wilkerson. Dee Rees is best known for her work on Pariah, according to The Internet Movie Database (IMDB).

Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson‘s book was a New York Times best seller in 2010. The Warmth of Other Suns informs the reader about the Great Migration of African American people who moved in masses from the Bible Belt South to the North. Isabel Wilkerson delved deep into the lives of over 1200 black people through interviews, in order to capture their amazing and historical stories. Wilkerson wanted to go deeper than the fact that these people moved from the South to ‘Up Nawth’ as Southern blacks like to say it, she wanted to know why they wanted to move and how they planned the move. Warmth of Others Suns goes beyond the geographics and the economics of the Great Migration, it chronicles the lives of these individuals starting from their childhoods all the way through their adult lives. According to Wilkerson, it is the biggest untold story.

It was important for Wilkerson to make contact with as many of these people as possible before they died. One of her toughest interviews was the one she held with her own mother. Anyone who knows anything about Black history knows that it is sometimes very difficult to pull information out of older Black people. Most of the time they feel that it’s just none of your business, but when one is able to get them to open up and talk about the past, the information that they share makes for great storytelling that is exciting to pass down through oral stories for generations to come.

In her research, which took about 15 years to compile, Isabel Wilkerson learned that her own mother migrated from Georgia to Washington D.C, which is where she met Isabel’s father, who had also migrated from Virginia. It was that bit of information that made Isabel realize that she was brought into this world by two people who had migrated to the same place. The research also revealed that six million blacks migrated from the South to the North for many of the same reasons that people migrate today. They wanted a piece of the American dream.

The Dee Rees–Shonda Rhimes FX adaptation of the book is currently in production.

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