THE PROMISED LAND: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America

by Nicholas Lemann ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 15, 1991

In describing the consequences of the great northward migration of black Americans from the South between 1940 and 1970, Lemann (The Fast Track, 1981; contributing editor to The Atlantic) may have written the best book on the tensions underlying American society since J. Anthony Lukas's Common Ground (1985). The migration originated in the invention of the mechanical cotton-picker, which made the sharecropper system obsolete. Trivial as this may sound, it caused, as Lemann explains, five million blacks to move north, made race a national issue, and gave the whole country ""a measure of the tragic sense that had previously been confined to the South."" Lemann shows how the migration changed the pattern of city life, disrupted education, made street crime an obsessive concern; changed voting patterns in the country as a whole, and gave birth to the idea that government programs don't work. He complements his analysis with telling accounts of those affected by the movement: Ruby Daniels, for example, a sympathetic figure though married multiple times and with a lifetime on welfare; Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley, encouraging blacks to come to Chicago to strengthen his machine, only to find them ultimately breaking it; and the politicians in Washington, fighting over what they never quite understood. Though lacking the vividness of reportage and ocean-deep research of Common Ground, this is a fine and elegant work, marked by intrepid fact-digging and insightful analysis.

Pub Date: March 15, 1991

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1991

Categories: NONFICTION