What do you think?
Rate this book
The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America
A New York Times bestseller, the groundbreaking authoritative history of the migration of African-Americans from the rural South to the urban North. A definitive book on American history, The Promised Land is also essential reading for educators and policymakers at both national and local levels.
416 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1991
63 people are currently reading
2153 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 70 reviews
February 2, 2019
There are some positive aspects to this book, the foremost being that it was written at all. It focuses on the causes and results of serious problems which had not been solved in 1991, with little optimism that ghetto problems would ever be solved except by the upward movement of people who found a way out.
The details of the individuals whose histories are presented are illuminating but difficult to follow and absorb - too much detail not put into clear narrative or context. The political machinations in Washington and Chicago (President Johnson & Mayor Daley) are fascinating and easier to follow, perhaps because I was aware of many of the events covered at the time they were happening.
Part of my problem in reading this book now is that it was written 28 years ago and while it has interest as history, its value as social and political commentary is seriously dated.
An additional note: I entered “American ghetto” as a search term in Amazon and found very few books on the topic, perhaps suggesting just how limited has been our sustained interest in the problem.
The details of the individuals whose histories are presented are illuminating but difficult to follow and absorb - too much detail not put into clear narrative or context. The political machinations in Washington and Chicago (President Johnson & Mayor Daley) are fascinating and easier to follow, perhaps because I was aware of many of the events covered at the time they were happening.
Part of my problem in reading this book now is that it was written 28 years ago and while it has interest as history, its value as social and political commentary is seriously dated.
An additional note: I entered “American ghetto” as a search term in Amazon and found very few books on the topic, perhaps suggesting just how limited has been our sustained interest in the problem.
January 20, 2015
Review: It gets a bit confusing because of the breadth of material covered and the not always chronological presentation of events, but it does provide a good flavor nonetheless. Strength of this book is weaving together broad historical trends and bringing us to the 1950s showing us the massive impact of the great migration, and showing the direct connection of this migration to today’s intractable ghetto conditions. Lemann is a journalist and appears to present the history accurately and fairly, but explicitly presents the narrative in a way to make a case for action.
This book addresses the 2nd great migration of blacks to the north. 77% of blacks lived in the south in 1940. By 1970, after the post WWII great migration had run its course, only 50% of blacks remained in the south. The key trends that brought about the migration are the equally exploitative sharecropping that replaced slavery, the breakdown of the black nuclear family during sharecropping, continuing reliance on black labor for cotton farming which made segregation and subjugation of blacks so desirable to whites, World War II's demand for labor in northern factories that induced the great migration (and whose end helped stop it), the invention of the fully mechanized Hopson cotton picker in 1944 in response to the outmigration of blacks, and the introduction of the minimum wage that put the nail in the coffin in the economics of low wage labor-based cotton farming. The civil rights movement of the 1960s accomplished its goals of voting rights and an end to mandatory segregation (though not de facto school and neighborhood segregation) but society never solved the massive migration of blacks to the north, its related social and economic disruption, nor provided any effective means to integrate these blacks into American society.
The Great Society might never have happened on the scale that it did were it not for the assassination of JFK, the interest of RFK in poverty issues, and the lionization of JFK as a champion of liberal causes that forced LBJ to continue JFK’s supposed legacy. LBJ didn’t want any “doles” so his “unconditional war on poverty” was undertaken through a “services strategy”: attack what is, as anthropologist Oscar Lewis coined, a “culture of poverty” by acculturating the black poor to the ways of the middle class: Head Start (the most enduring success of the Great Society), legal services, Job Corps, etc.
Dick Boone's activist and untested concept of "maximum feasible participation", a community action strategy, made its way into the Great Society as a way to bypass southern white-controlled groups, but encountered unexpected resistance from local politicians in the North, like Chicago’s Democratic political machine under Mayor Daley, whose turf was threatened when federal funding bypassed local officials in favor of community organizations under OEO. Untested organizations not under central control, some of which included black nationalist organizations and reformed gangs, had occasional problems and made bad publicity, engendering more local criticism. Despite the generally liberal climate of the times, Sargent Shriver’s OEO lost support even among Democrats. Senator RFK and Democrats turned to community development approaches like LBJ’s Model Cities program which showed Democrat support for ghetto programs but did not force the issue of racial integration and had no local political enemies, only friends.
Rather than being received as a call to action, Pat Moynihan’s 1965 report on the black family was heavily criticized by liberals, one critic actually coining the term “blaming the victim” in response to it, further splitting center liberals from left liberals, paralyzing the public discussion on poverty, and villainizing a lifelong champion of liberal causes.
With 164 race riots in the first 9 months of 1967, the 1968 assassination of MLK Jr, and Nixon’s victory in 1968, the counterreaction was complete. Nixon was elected by white backlash. Moynihan went to work for Nixon, advising an increase in Great Society spending to preempt liberal criticism, so many increases actually took place under Nixon. Moynihan’s income strategy for improving the livelihood of blacks succeeded, allowing the government to cut the bureaucracy (that was providing massive employment to educated blacks) required under the services strategy. However, after his election to his 2nd term in 1972 when he no longer had to worry about reelection, Nixon gutted all the Great Society programs. The window to solve the problems of the ghetto was closed; the electorate had turned conservative. Meanwhile, the impression still remains that large federal anti-poverty programs don’t work.
Ghettos were originally perceived as the lot of new immigrants. Gunnar Myrdal introduced the concept of a permanent “under-class” in 1962. A number of explanations of permanent ghettoes were offered. Ironically, the Great Society mainly benefitted middle class blacks through hiring blacks to run the Great Society. In 1970, 57% of male and 72% of female black college graduates were employed by the government. But instead of improving the ghettos, Conservative scholar William Wilson in 1987 said middle class blacks used the income they earned to move out of the ghettos, leaving the ghettos without a stabilizing influence. He also made discussion of the black family respectable again, though the “culture of poverty” concept was still considered offensive. Disillusioned liberal Charles Murray in 1984 blamed the Great Society’s removal of the incentive to marry or work, saying the liberal tendency to excuse bad behavior just encouraged more bad behavior. Christopher Jencks explanation was social trends of the 60s and 70s including the growing respectability of divorce, higher crime, less respect for authority etc. Due to less education and higher social disorganization, those trends disproportionately affected blacks. Lemann argues the 1980s debate about the underclass was statistical with little field research.
Black intellectuals, disconnected from the ghettos, did not embrace the underclass idea and were afraid to encourage old white prejudices about black laziness, criminality etc. The debate between Booker T. Washington’s black self-help approach versus WEB DuBois’ focus on legal equality continues among black intellectuals. Washingtonism is rejected by most of today’s black leadership.
Lemann supports a renewed war on poverty with a federally funded services strategy that does not bypass local officials and benefits from 50 years of research that was nonexistent in the 1960s. Community development doesn’t work: a ghetto cannot be developed, we can only help aspiring people to get out of the ghettos and into the mainstream. Lemann believes today’s pervasive skepticism towards anti-poverty programs ignores that there was no research during the Great Society demonstrating what would work. Now there is. He argues that society can achieve long term savings on welfare and incarceration costs with correctly targeted programs. If programs can be shown to work, the political forces of practicality can be swayed to support new social spending.
The current liberal intellectual consensus is that poverty efforts must be masked in race neutral terms to provide political cover. Lemann argues that this is self-defeating. As his history of the Great Migration shows, today’s ghetto poverty has a direct connection to slavery and sharecropping. As such, it is a moral issue, and as the experience of the civil rights movement demonstrates, society’s urgency for action will only arise when it is acknowledged as a moral cause. Lemann wants to awaken America’s racial conscience from its decades-long hibernation. Black slums are “the most significant remaining piece of unfinished business in our country’s long struggle to overcome its original sin of slavery.”
This book addresses the 2nd great migration of blacks to the north. 77% of blacks lived in the south in 1940. By 1970, after the post WWII great migration had run its course, only 50% of blacks remained in the south. The key trends that brought about the migration are the equally exploitative sharecropping that replaced slavery, the breakdown of the black nuclear family during sharecropping, continuing reliance on black labor for cotton farming which made segregation and subjugation of blacks so desirable to whites, World War II's demand for labor in northern factories that induced the great migration (and whose end helped stop it), the invention of the fully mechanized Hopson cotton picker in 1944 in response to the outmigration of blacks, and the introduction of the minimum wage that put the nail in the coffin in the economics of low wage labor-based cotton farming. The civil rights movement of the 1960s accomplished its goals of voting rights and an end to mandatory segregation (though not de facto school and neighborhood segregation) but society never solved the massive migration of blacks to the north, its related social and economic disruption, nor provided any effective means to integrate these blacks into American society.
The Great Society might never have happened on the scale that it did were it not for the assassination of JFK, the interest of RFK in poverty issues, and the lionization of JFK as a champion of liberal causes that forced LBJ to continue JFK’s supposed legacy. LBJ didn’t want any “doles” so his “unconditional war on poverty” was undertaken through a “services strategy”: attack what is, as anthropologist Oscar Lewis coined, a “culture of poverty” by acculturating the black poor to the ways of the middle class: Head Start (the most enduring success of the Great Society), legal services, Job Corps, etc.
Dick Boone's activist and untested concept of "maximum feasible participation", a community action strategy, made its way into the Great Society as a way to bypass southern white-controlled groups, but encountered unexpected resistance from local politicians in the North, like Chicago’s Democratic political machine under Mayor Daley, whose turf was threatened when federal funding bypassed local officials in favor of community organizations under OEO. Untested organizations not under central control, some of which included black nationalist organizations and reformed gangs, had occasional problems and made bad publicity, engendering more local criticism. Despite the generally liberal climate of the times, Sargent Shriver’s OEO lost support even among Democrats. Senator RFK and Democrats turned to community development approaches like LBJ’s Model Cities program which showed Democrat support for ghetto programs but did not force the issue of racial integration and had no local political enemies, only friends.
Rather than being received as a call to action, Pat Moynihan’s 1965 report on the black family was heavily criticized by liberals, one critic actually coining the term “blaming the victim” in response to it, further splitting center liberals from left liberals, paralyzing the public discussion on poverty, and villainizing a lifelong champion of liberal causes.
With 164 race riots in the first 9 months of 1967, the 1968 assassination of MLK Jr, and Nixon’s victory in 1968, the counterreaction was complete. Nixon was elected by white backlash. Moynihan went to work for Nixon, advising an increase in Great Society spending to preempt liberal criticism, so many increases actually took place under Nixon. Moynihan’s income strategy for improving the livelihood of blacks succeeded, allowing the government to cut the bureaucracy (that was providing massive employment to educated blacks) required under the services strategy. However, after his election to his 2nd term in 1972 when he no longer had to worry about reelection, Nixon gutted all the Great Society programs. The window to solve the problems of the ghetto was closed; the electorate had turned conservative. Meanwhile, the impression still remains that large federal anti-poverty programs don’t work.
Ghettos were originally perceived as the lot of new immigrants. Gunnar Myrdal introduced the concept of a permanent “under-class” in 1962. A number of explanations of permanent ghettoes were offered. Ironically, the Great Society mainly benefitted middle class blacks through hiring blacks to run the Great Society. In 1970, 57% of male and 72% of female black college graduates were employed by the government. But instead of improving the ghettos, Conservative scholar William Wilson in 1987 said middle class blacks used the income they earned to move out of the ghettos, leaving the ghettos without a stabilizing influence. He also made discussion of the black family respectable again, though the “culture of poverty” concept was still considered offensive. Disillusioned liberal Charles Murray in 1984 blamed the Great Society’s removal of the incentive to marry or work, saying the liberal tendency to excuse bad behavior just encouraged more bad behavior. Christopher Jencks explanation was social trends of the 60s and 70s including the growing respectability of divorce, higher crime, less respect for authority etc. Due to less education and higher social disorganization, those trends disproportionately affected blacks. Lemann argues the 1980s debate about the underclass was statistical with little field research.
Black intellectuals, disconnected from the ghettos, did not embrace the underclass idea and were afraid to encourage old white prejudices about black laziness, criminality etc. The debate between Booker T. Washington’s black self-help approach versus WEB DuBois’ focus on legal equality continues among black intellectuals. Washingtonism is rejected by most of today’s black leadership.
Lemann supports a renewed war on poverty with a federally funded services strategy that does not bypass local officials and benefits from 50 years of research that was nonexistent in the 1960s. Community development doesn’t work: a ghetto cannot be developed, we can only help aspiring people to get out of the ghettos and into the mainstream. Lemann believes today’s pervasive skepticism towards anti-poverty programs ignores that there was no research during the Great Society demonstrating what would work. Now there is. He argues that society can achieve long term savings on welfare and incarceration costs with correctly targeted programs. If programs can be shown to work, the political forces of practicality can be swayed to support new social spending.
The current liberal intellectual consensus is that poverty efforts must be masked in race neutral terms to provide political cover. Lemann argues that this is self-defeating. As his history of the Great Migration shows, today’s ghetto poverty has a direct connection to slavery and sharecropping. As such, it is a moral issue, and as the experience of the civil rights movement demonstrates, society’s urgency for action will only arise when it is acknowledged as a moral cause. Lemann wants to awaken America’s racial conscience from its decades-long hibernation. Black slums are “the most significant remaining piece of unfinished business in our country’s long struggle to overcome its original sin of slavery.”
March 14, 2009
Bill Kauffman turns the meaning of lib ral and conservative upside down in America First: Its History Culture and Politics. He suggests that an examination of the history of isolationist and non-interventionist movements reveals them to be closely tied to the much maligned voice of the populists, a voice he says reveals the true nature of the" silent majority", a movement that owes much to George Washington and the founding fathers who desperately feared "foreign entanglements;" the messianic impulse to save the world being a creation of the Wall Street financiers and militarists who profited mightily from the wars ("a small war might take the people's minds off our economic problems," wrote one in 1898. Barely can one predict the impact of new inventions. Eli Whitney's cotton gin made possible the production of cheap cotton which led to the need for cheap labor to harvest it which led to an increased justification for slavery. The mass production of the cotton harvester in 1944, spurred on by high cotton prices and a shortage of labor, virtually eliminated the need for cheap labor and caused the migration of thousands of b lacks seeking jobs in the industrial north.
The impact of this movement and race relations in general are explored in Promised Land: The Great Black. Migration and How It Changed America by Nicholas Lemann. Labor supply in the south was intimately tie d to race. Segregatio n reinforced the share-cropper system created after the Civil War as a substitute for slavery. It prevented upward mobility of blacks, perpetuating cheap labor.
The sharecroppin system, devised by white plantation owners to trap their labor supply into a system of virtual peonage, left a society that by 1945 resembled a big city ghetto: high illegitimacy (with no AFDC), female-headed households, a miserable educational system, and a very high rate of violent crime. Home brewed-whiskey was "more physically perilous than crack cocaine is today."
In 1940, "rural south" was almost synonymous with "black, but by 1970 the euphemism had changed; now urban was synonymous with poor black.
By then race relations could no longer be ignored, except of course, by while, rural, Republicans to their discredit. The" decoupling of race from cotton [has influenced:] popular culture, presidential politics, urban geography, education, justice, [and:] social welfare." But urban liberals didn't get it either as they supported urban renewal which merely resulted in land developers and high-rise builders enriching their own pockets. Herbet Gans wrote in The Urban Villagers, "the low-income population was in effect subsidizing its own removal for the benefit of the wealthy."
Lemann's description of how the anti-poverty programs came to be is enlightening. Ironically, JFK had not formulated any serious plans for eliminating poverty, but he had several aides, including Walter Heller, who were captivated by the idea. After Kennedy's death, his supporters made a conscious effort to paint Kennedy as being much more liberal than he really was. Johnson visualized himself as more liberal than Kennedy, and he wanted an issue to call his own to carry him through the next presidential election. Many of the antipoverty plans made him uncomfortable because, being a pragmatist, he was looking for measurable solutions and programs that worked. The plans that were being foisted on him as Kennedy's legacy had not been tried; they were mere academic speculations. Yet he was forced to adopt many of them or look like he was abandoning the martyred president's legacy, something he politically could not afford to do. The assumption behind the war on poverty was that poverty was cultural in nature. This idea came from social anthropologists, and it meant that if parents could not acculturate their children to the bourgeois society, then government could. The rural migrants to the urban north fit the mold perfectly as guinea pigs for the great experiment.
The other side of the argument maintained that poverty was political and resulted from a lack of political power. The Irish, for example, struggled into the middle class by gaining control of the political structure. These two ideologies were to clash constantly. And the problem was that any program that offended white middle class sensibilities was doomed to failure from the start.
Contrary to current popular opinion, the War on Poverty, was not a failure. The huge numbers of jobs that were created to implement the programs went primarily to blacks and that, in effect, created a black middle class that promptly moved out of the ghettos leaving them in much worse shape because the motivated folks who got the jobs had provided the strength and structure to those communities.
Lemann discusses the failure of housing projects at some length. Apparently they have worked quite well in areas where the original rules and goals were adhered to, i.e. tenants were carefully screened using several criteria including the requirement that the tenant have a job and be part of a two parent household. In Chicago, those rules were discarded for two reasons: the ACLU filed suit claiming the rules were arbitrarily discriminatory (surely true, but another example of good intentions causing unintended results) and the lack of people meeting the criteria. It became essential for the politicians to prove the projects were a success but they were not filling the buildings fast enough so screening went out the window.
Lemann's analysis of the political maneuvering that went on in Washington and his descriptions of the hidden and not-so-secret agendas of all the groups is fascinating and ought to be required reading for everyone.
The impact of this movement and race relations in general are explored in Promised Land: The Great Black. Migration and How It Changed America by Nicholas Lemann. Labor supply in the south was intimately tie d to race. Segregatio n reinforced the share-cropper system created after the Civil War as a substitute for slavery. It prevented upward mobility of blacks, perpetuating cheap labor.
The sharecroppin system, devised by white plantation owners to trap their labor supply into a system of virtual peonage, left a society that by 1945 resembled a big city ghetto: high illegitimacy (with no AFDC), female-headed households, a miserable educational system, and a very high rate of violent crime. Home brewed-whiskey was "more physically perilous than crack cocaine is today."
In 1940, "rural south" was almost synonymous with "black, but by 1970 the euphemism had changed; now urban was synonymous with poor black.
By then race relations could no longer be ignored, except of course, by while, rural, Republicans to their discredit. The" decoupling of race from cotton [has influenced:] popular culture, presidential politics, urban geography, education, justice, [and:] social welfare." But urban liberals didn't get it either as they supported urban renewal which merely resulted in land developers and high-rise builders enriching their own pockets. Herbet Gans wrote in The Urban Villagers, "the low-income population was in effect subsidizing its own removal for the benefit of the wealthy."
Lemann's description of how the anti-poverty programs came to be is enlightening. Ironically, JFK had not formulated any serious plans for eliminating poverty, but he had several aides, including Walter Heller, who were captivated by the idea. After Kennedy's death, his supporters made a conscious effort to paint Kennedy as being much more liberal than he really was. Johnson visualized himself as more liberal than Kennedy, and he wanted an issue to call his own to carry him through the next presidential election. Many of the antipoverty plans made him uncomfortable because, being a pragmatist, he was looking for measurable solutions and programs that worked. The plans that were being foisted on him as Kennedy's legacy had not been tried; they were mere academic speculations. Yet he was forced to adopt many of them or look like he was abandoning the martyred president's legacy, something he politically could not afford to do. The assumption behind the war on poverty was that poverty was cultural in nature. This idea came from social anthropologists, and it meant that if parents could not acculturate their children to the bourgeois society, then government could. The rural migrants to the urban north fit the mold perfectly as guinea pigs for the great experiment.
The other side of the argument maintained that poverty was political and resulted from a lack of political power. The Irish, for example, struggled into the middle class by gaining control of the political structure. These two ideologies were to clash constantly. And the problem was that any program that offended white middle class sensibilities was doomed to failure from the start.
Contrary to current popular opinion, the War on Poverty, was not a failure. The huge numbers of jobs that were created to implement the programs went primarily to blacks and that, in effect, created a black middle class that promptly moved out of the ghettos leaving them in much worse shape because the motivated folks who got the jobs had provided the strength and structure to those communities.
Lemann discusses the failure of housing projects at some length. Apparently they have worked quite well in areas where the original rules and goals were adhered to, i.e. tenants were carefully screened using several criteria including the requirement that the tenant have a job and be part of a two parent household. In Chicago, those rules were discarded for two reasons: the ACLU filed suit claiming the rules were arbitrarily discriminatory (surely true, but another example of good intentions causing unintended results) and the lack of people meeting the criteria. It became essential for the politicians to prove the projects were a success but they were not filling the buildings fast enough so screening went out the window.
Lemann's analysis of the political maneuvering that went on in Washington and his descriptions of the hidden and not-so-secret agendas of all the groups is fascinating and ought to be required reading for everyone.
July 31, 2016
This was a surprisingly lengthy and dense book; it took me the better part of a week to read it. The font is tiny, and it is full of policy and politics, as well as narratives about the lives of the people it describes. I'm giving it four stars because parts of it were rather dry. Overall, though, I'm very glad I read it.
A week or two ago, I was watching a video on Upworthy about the gun violence in Chicago, where--literally--hundreds of mostly young and black people die each year. I've only been to Chicago once, twenty years ago, and all I knew about its history came from the book, NPR series, and film Our America. So I thought to myself, how did this place get so screwed up? Promised Land gave me my answer.
From the 1940 to the 1970s, tens of millions of African-Americans left the deep South and migrated to cities like Chicago. Chicago in particular received a great many black people from the Mississippi Delta, the deepest and darkest part of the South there is. They came seeking better jobs, to escape Jim Crow, and to try to better their lives. They brought with them all of the social dysfunction that's associated with rural poverty (which simply turned into urban poverty): violence, substance abuse, broken families, crime, ignorance, and on and on. The first part of this book follows several individuals and families as they make the decision to move, then do so, landing in a Chicago that was home to a successful black middle-class that resented many of the country folks and their screwed up lives. The numbers are staggering, and according to the author, this migration is the largest in American history. I don't disbelieve him.
The long middle part of the book discusses the response to this migration by the City of Chicago (Mayor Richard Dayley the First, to be specific), and the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations in DC. There is a lot on the history of Johnson's War on Poverty, and the machinations of one Daniel Patrick Monyihan. I was fascinated to read about the tension between old-school Democratic machine politics and the (at the time) new push for community empowerment and community organizing. In the end, massive housing projects were built to house the new immigrants to Chicago--Cabrini Green, the Ida B. Wells and Robert Taylor Homes--and other names that were familiar to me from Our America and the old 70s show Good Times. To say that these dysfunctional high rises were not good places to live is a wild understatement, and it is a testimony to the strength of their families that both Deval Patrick and Michelle Obama were able to survive their childhoods in the south side of Chicago. I was reminded of another book I read a few years ago, American Dream Three Women Ten Kids and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare which covered similar ground.
Finally, the book describes the often overlooked Civil Rights movement in Chicago, and how figures like Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Louis Farakhan, and Jesse Jackson fought and struggled with how to end discrimination in the north.
The book was written in the early 1990s, so none of what's happened since then is covered, but to say that I've schooled myself in just what's made the South Side of Chicago so dysfunctional in an understatement. I could teach a class on it now! It is a depressing and complex story about people in power who either don't care what happens to the urban poor (or the rural poor, really), or who believe that the answer to every problem in the world will come from some bright technocrat in Washington. Nothing works. Not benign neglect, not forced integration, not spending incredible amounts of money, not local control, not federalization, nothing. If there is an answer to unravelling the tangled knot of violence, hopelessness, and despair that's been created by 400 years of racism, I don't know what it is.
I was just reading a long article in The New Yorker about the Newark Public Schools, where the budget is upward of one billion dollars per year. The schools are so bad that local control was taken away and given to the state of New Jersey. That didn't work. So the state gave control to a cabal of private sector experts and added an additional $200 million dollars of spending ($100 million from the CEO of Facebook). Charter schools, teacher evaluations, lots of metrics, extended days, the whole panoply of business oriented, market based, conservative reforms. And it didn't work. The needle didn't move one inch. In Washington DC, the city/state/federal government spends nearly $40k per student in their public schools and gets dismal results (only 17% of the kids can read, write, or do math at grade level). Michelle Rhee marched in there, turned it into the educational version of "Shark Tank"…and nothing happened.
So I don't know what the answer(s) is/are. It's not money, although I imagine things would be much more difficult without programs like Head Start, SNAP, and Title I. How long can a country last when there is a growing population of people who simply can't take care of themselves? And, when will we finally recognize the fact that we are still dealing with the consequences of slavery, segregation, and racism? We bear the wounds of our history. Perhaps we should have some sort of national truth and reconciliation project like South Africa did.
I imagine that would go over well on FOX.
A week or two ago, I was watching a video on Upworthy about the gun violence in Chicago, where--literally--hundreds of mostly young and black people die each year. I've only been to Chicago once, twenty years ago, and all I knew about its history came from the book, NPR series, and film Our America. So I thought to myself, how did this place get so screwed up? Promised Land gave me my answer.
From the 1940 to the 1970s, tens of millions of African-Americans left the deep South and migrated to cities like Chicago. Chicago in particular received a great many black people from the Mississippi Delta, the deepest and darkest part of the South there is. They came seeking better jobs, to escape Jim Crow, and to try to better their lives. They brought with them all of the social dysfunction that's associated with rural poverty (which simply turned into urban poverty): violence, substance abuse, broken families, crime, ignorance, and on and on. The first part of this book follows several individuals and families as they make the decision to move, then do so, landing in a Chicago that was home to a successful black middle-class that resented many of the country folks and their screwed up lives. The numbers are staggering, and according to the author, this migration is the largest in American history. I don't disbelieve him.
The long middle part of the book discusses the response to this migration by the City of Chicago (Mayor Richard Dayley the First, to be specific), and the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations in DC. There is a lot on the history of Johnson's War on Poverty, and the machinations of one Daniel Patrick Monyihan. I was fascinated to read about the tension between old-school Democratic machine politics and the (at the time) new push for community empowerment and community organizing. In the end, massive housing projects were built to house the new immigrants to Chicago--Cabrini Green, the Ida B. Wells and Robert Taylor Homes--and other names that were familiar to me from Our America and the old 70s show Good Times. To say that these dysfunctional high rises were not good places to live is a wild understatement, and it is a testimony to the strength of their families that both Deval Patrick and Michelle Obama were able to survive their childhoods in the south side of Chicago. I was reminded of another book I read a few years ago, American Dream Three Women Ten Kids and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare which covered similar ground.
Finally, the book describes the often overlooked Civil Rights movement in Chicago, and how figures like Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Louis Farakhan, and Jesse Jackson fought and struggled with how to end discrimination in the north.
The book was written in the early 1990s, so none of what's happened since then is covered, but to say that I've schooled myself in just what's made the South Side of Chicago so dysfunctional in an understatement. I could teach a class on it now! It is a depressing and complex story about people in power who either don't care what happens to the urban poor (or the rural poor, really), or who believe that the answer to every problem in the world will come from some bright technocrat in Washington. Nothing works. Not benign neglect, not forced integration, not spending incredible amounts of money, not local control, not federalization, nothing. If there is an answer to unravelling the tangled knot of violence, hopelessness, and despair that's been created by 400 years of racism, I don't know what it is.
I was just reading a long article in The New Yorker about the Newark Public Schools, where the budget is upward of one billion dollars per year. The schools are so bad that local control was taken away and given to the state of New Jersey. That didn't work. So the state gave control to a cabal of private sector experts and added an additional $200 million dollars of spending ($100 million from the CEO of Facebook). Charter schools, teacher evaluations, lots of metrics, extended days, the whole panoply of business oriented, market based, conservative reforms. And it didn't work. The needle didn't move one inch. In Washington DC, the city/state/federal government spends nearly $40k per student in their public schools and gets dismal results (only 17% of the kids can read, write, or do math at grade level). Michelle Rhee marched in there, turned it into the educational version of "Shark Tank"…and nothing happened.
So I don't know what the answer(s) is/are. It's not money, although I imagine things would be much more difficult without programs like Head Start, SNAP, and Title I. How long can a country last when there is a growing population of people who simply can't take care of themselves? And, when will we finally recognize the fact that we are still dealing with the consequences of slavery, segregation, and racism? We bear the wounds of our history. Perhaps we should have some sort of national truth and reconciliation project like South Africa did.
I imagine that would go over well on FOX.
July 13, 2025
This is a great book, one of my all-time faves. I’ve read this many times since 1991 and still find its 187,000 words worth rereading & pondering.
Perhaps my biggest complaint against this book is the fact that it employs endnotes (16,000 words) at the back of the book instead of footnotes at the bottom of its pages.
I expended meaningful labor to copy & paste a digital edition of The Promised Land (TPL) into MS Word, and then transfer its 850 endnotes from the back of the book into their proper location in the main body—tedious but doable, and worth it for the sake of noting the source of the book's many remarkable assertions.
The annoyance of those endnotes made me think about why Lemann deployed them in the first place. One motive may have been economic, since footnotes may dissuade casual readers from reading this book thereby decreasing sales. A less charitable motive is that endnotes shroud info by requiring readers to expend extra effort searching the back pages for a measly citation.
The Promised Land is an ethnography written by a historian of ideas. Pride of place in these pages is reserved for “the superstructure of ideas” but close readers of this book naturally want to know the source of its many remarkable statements.
Ruby Lee Hopkins-Daniels, one main character, is a former sharecropper who moves north to Chicago to better her station; by story’s end she's made a roundtrip return to Clarksdale to retire.
Many of the stories that Ruby told Lemann for his retelling are extraordinary, often hard to believe. Readers will likely notice when Lemann, perforce a friendly interrogator, does not press his informants (like Ruby) when they make implausible claims.
The Promised Land (TPL) introduces dozens of different characters in all kinds of major & minor roles. Like so many of Shakespeare plays, some of the best, most telling lines in TPL come from characters who make brief cameo appearances before leaving the stage, never to be heard from again. One such important instance involves George F. Kennan, about which I’ll say more below.
In addition to constantly having to flip to endnotes instead of footnotes, and to the difficulty of keeping track of so many characters, one must add that Lemann doesn’t tell this story in strictly chronological order — so keeping track of persons, places & dates is taxing. (I’ve lately taken to inputting notes from TPL into a spreadsheet, which has helped me “see” the story in new light, about which I'll say more in a future update to this review.)
—————————————————————
Between June 1986 and Dec. 1988 Lemann published three long essays about Chicago’s underclass in The Atlantic Monthly. I’m reluctant to call these essays rough drafts because almost nothing in them was later republished in The Promised Land. With that said, I still recommend reading these three early drafts for the sense they give one of Lemann’s thinking.
1. June 1986: ‘The Origins of the Underclass’, Part 1 (13,500 words) https://www.theatlantic.com/past/poli...
2. July 1986: ‘The Origins of the Underclass’, Part 2 (10,100 words) http://www.theatlantic.com/past/polit...
3. Dec. 1988: ‘The Unfinished War’ (13,800 words) http://www.theatlantic.com/past/polit...
In 2007 Doubleday published an anthology entitled The Best of The Atlantic Monthly which included Lemann’s June 1986 essay cited above. Here is an excerpt from the anthology editor's introduction to Lemann's essay (my emphases):
It’s worth noting that when the paperback edition of TPL was published in 1992, it included several pages of admiring blurbs, including the following rave-endorsement from Wilson himself:
===========================
More Lemann “rough drafts” :
4. Washington Post: May 1989: ‘The Underclass Cycle: Making It—Then and Now’ (2100 words)
https://archive.ph/KPZth
This WaPo essay includes significant statements from Lemann that I'll say more about below.
5. New York Times, Jan. 1991: ‘Four Generations in the Projects’ (6200 words)
https://archive.ph/t1gN3
6. Atlantic Monthly, March 1991: ‘Notes: Healing the Ghettos’ (2700 words)
https://archive.ph/QuVpi
The best synopsis (only 500 words) of The Promised Land was written by Lemann himself to rebut criticism from Mitchell Duneier, who coincidentally was in 1991 Wilson's graduate student & today is chairman of Princeton's sociology department—a bishop in the urban-sociology clerisy to Wilson’s papacy.
I highly recommend reading Duneier’s 620-word complaint: https://archive.ph/0RliV
And Lemann’s rebuttal: https://archive.ph/kzua0
===========================
Lemann is an intellectual historian. In 1996 he told a reporter:
“It is impossible to read Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives, published in 1890, without noticing the parallels between Riis’s concerns and those of middle-class reformers in the big cities today.”
“Riis even shared some of the suspicions of present-day conservatives that social programs may add to, rather than diminish, the conditions they seek to alleviate.”
“In Riis’s work . . . there lurks just beneath the surface the idea that ethnicity is destiny. Obviously the same idea , again barely submerged, is around today....”
[My note: Obviously, Lemann rejects Riis's insinuation "that ethnicity is destiny."]
“I don’t mean to argue that all the problems of the ghettos are simply going to go away over time—only that the current atmosphere of fatalism is unwarranted . What will happen is similar to what has happened in the past.”
“The main difference between today’s ghettos and those that Riis wrote about is that there are so many fewer poor husband-wife families today—a difference that does make today’s underclass more intractable but still not totally so.”
“Today, most discussion of the underclass is strongly influenced by the idea that government social programs can’t possibly help.”
Consider this line from Lemann’s WaPo oped:
“ The underclass is cut off from the rest of America, and what it needs is the direct intervention of the whole society , not just black society. A generation from now, the wild pessimism now prevailing about the underclass will seem dated; . . .”
Given that a generation has passed since 1989, one wonders if Lemann would aver that his own prediction—"A generation from now, the wild pessimism now prevailing about the underclass will seem dated"—has, in his own eyes, proven true or false.
===========================
The Promised Land includes Lemann's interesting summaries of other famous peoples' views on race & welfare: William Alexander Percy, John Dollard, Charles S. Johnson, Arthur Raper, E. Franklin Frazier, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Gutman, and Stanley Elkins.
Lemann’s comments spurred me to read (two books by) Hortense Powdermaker, David L. Cohn’s Where I Was Born (a book Nick disparages but I thought good), Drake & Cayton's Black Metropolis, Kenneth Clark's great book Dark Ghetto, Wm. J. Wilson’s The Declining Significance of Race (1978), and Daniel P. Moynihan’s singularly great 17,000-word report “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action” (1965).
TPL got rave reviews worth reading from prominent liberals like C. Vann Woodward, Anthony Lewis, and Garry Wills.
Woodward: https://archive.ph/eiuT1
Lewis: https://archive.ph/e2qQm
Wills: https://archive.ph/CAoh1
===========================
Over the years my sense of the “villain” in TPL has changed. At first I conceived the villain to be farm mechanization. But after more rereading I came to think that the villain was Daniel P. Moynihan — which is funny, because now I’m a huge fan of DPM, Seymour Lipset & Nathan Glazer.
These days I think the most villainous (but well meaning, which makes him diabolical) character in TPL is Nicholas von Hoffman.
But Lemann’s an intellectual historian, so he’s more interested in ideas than individuals, and his goal in this book is to suss out the constellation of ideas animating the choices made by his characters.
In short, the villainous idea besetting The Promised Land is defeatism, fatalism, resignation in the face of decay, lack of political will to deploy government power to ameliorate suffering.
In this sense Lemann himself reminds me of the cohort of progressives whom Perry Miller called (in his introductory essay to American Thought : Civil War To World War I (1954)) "the optimistic Darwinians" (Henry Ward Beecher, Lyman Abbott, Henry George, Lester Ward, Henry Demarest Lloyd) who believed the state’s power should be used to ameliorate suffering.
In contrast, “the pessimistic Darwinians" (William Graham Sumner, Herbert Spencer, Oliver W. Holmes, Jr.) are the kind of people who (like Pontius Pilate) disavow responsibility for outcomes produced by forces beyond their direct control, by (for instance) the market.
In Lemann's view, the ghettos persist because of governmental indifference, defeatism, “a weakness of spirit" (351) that is exemplified by a scene recounted in The Promised Land that took place in 1965 at a cocktail-party, when onto the stage in a walk-on cameo appears
In TPL's last chapter Lemann laments that
Kennan—like his anti-imperialist, anti-statist, anti-progressivist forebear, Wm. Graham Sumner (1840-1910)—also vehemently opposed NATO’s expansion in 1998. https://archive.ph/qqVRt
===========================
The best critical review of TPL that I've read is by Thomas Byrne Edsall (The New Republic, May 27, 1991), whom Lemann later hired at Columbia, in service (I guess) of the old adage that one should: Keep your friends close & your best critics even closer.
Edsall wrote:
_______________________________
Lemann writes in TPL:
Lemann's informants tell him of several instances of sexual abuse. When 18-year-old Connie Henry begins sexual relations with 15-year-old Johnnie Haynes (244), I was struck by what appeared to be Connie's reenactment of the same predatory sexuality that was once forced upon her. None of Lemann's informants, nor Lemann himself, saw fit to comment upon what looked to me like a cycle of sexual abuse.
===========================
Lemann mocks the widely-held, seemingly "irresistibly appealing" notion
Notice that among the five "irresistibly appealing" (347) popular beliefs that Lemann mocks as explanations for the problems besetting the ghetto, one particularly popular belief the he cited in his rough drafts & opeds is not mentioned among the popular, "irresistibly appealing" explanations: single female-headed-households.
In his opeds and rough drafts Lemann does cite single-parent-headed households as a contributing factor to ghettos, but not in his book—perhaps due to pressure from the academic clerisy?
Perhaps my biggest complaint against this book is the fact that it employs endnotes (16,000 words) at the back of the book instead of footnotes at the bottom of its pages.
I expended meaningful labor to copy & paste a digital edition of The Promised Land (TPL) into MS Word, and then transfer its 850 endnotes from the back of the book into their proper location in the main body—tedious but doable, and worth it for the sake of noting the source of the book's many remarkable assertions.
The annoyance of those endnotes made me think about why Lemann deployed them in the first place. One motive may have been economic, since footnotes may dissuade casual readers from reading this book thereby decreasing sales. A less charitable motive is that endnotes shroud info by requiring readers to expend extra effort searching the back pages for a measly citation.
The Promised Land is an ethnography written by a historian of ideas. Pride of place in these pages is reserved for “the superstructure of ideas” but close readers of this book naturally want to know the source of its many remarkable statements.
Ruby Lee Hopkins-Daniels, one main character, is a former sharecropper who moves north to Chicago to better her station; by story’s end she's made a roundtrip return to Clarksdale to retire.
Many of the stories that Ruby told Lemann for his retelling are extraordinary, often hard to believe. Readers will likely notice when Lemann, perforce a friendly interrogator, does not press his informants (like Ruby) when they make implausible claims.
The Promised Land (TPL) introduces dozens of different characters in all kinds of major & minor roles. Like so many of Shakespeare plays, some of the best, most telling lines in TPL come from characters who make brief cameo appearances before leaving the stage, never to be heard from again. One such important instance involves George F. Kennan, about which I’ll say more below.
In addition to constantly having to flip to endnotes instead of footnotes, and to the difficulty of keeping track of so many characters, one must add that Lemann doesn’t tell this story in strictly chronological order — so keeping track of persons, places & dates is taxing. (I’ve lately taken to inputting notes from TPL into a spreadsheet, which has helped me “see” the story in new light, about which I'll say more in a future update to this review.)
—————————————————————
Between June 1986 and Dec. 1988 Lemann published three long essays about Chicago’s underclass in The Atlantic Monthly. I’m reluctant to call these essays rough drafts because almost nothing in them was later republished in The Promised Land. With that said, I still recommend reading these three early drafts for the sense they give one of Lemann’s thinking.
1. June 1986: ‘The Origins of the Underclass’, Part 1 (13,500 words) https://www.theatlantic.com/past/poli...
2. July 1986: ‘The Origins of the Underclass’, Part 2 (10,100 words) http://www.theatlantic.com/past/polit...
3. Dec. 1988: ‘The Unfinished War’ (13,800 words) http://www.theatlantic.com/past/polit...
In 2007 Doubleday published an anthology entitled The Best of The Atlantic Monthly which included Lemann’s June 1986 essay cited above. Here is an excerpt from the anthology editor's introduction to Lemann's essay (my emphases):
“[The Promised Land] won a number of awards and was selected by a New York University panel of journalists and scholars as one of the top one hundred works of twentieth-century American journalism. The Promised Land first came to fruition five years earlier as an ambitious two-part series in The Atlantic, where Lemann had worked as a national correspondent from 1983 to 1998. Lemann wrote ‘The Origins of the Underclass’ out of a conviction that traditional economic arguments, whether liberal or conservative, did not adequately explain why, two decades after the civil rights movement, millions of African Americans continued to live under conditions of unendurable poverty.”The editor then adds this remarkable statement (my emphases):
Such a provocative thesis, coming from a white journalist, was fated to be controversial; the Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson, for one, called Lemann’s hypothesis “fundamentally incorrect.” But Lemann’s reporting was so exhaustively researched and so deeply rooted in real-life characters that it drew plaudits from both ends of the political spectrum—from Garry Wills to George Will.
It’s worth noting that when the paperback edition of TPL was published in 1992, it included several pages of admiring blurbs, including the following rave-endorsement from Wilson himself:
“The Promised Land is must reading for anyone interested in the problems of urban migration and the way policy makers addressed them.I mention this anecdote about Wilson's changed view because I think—in regards to the history of ideas—it would be good to know exactly what Wilson disliked about the Atlantic Magazine rough draft, what Lemann changed/cut in order to win his blessing, and how Lemann feels about those edits in hindsight.
—William Julius Wilson, University of Chicago”
===========================
More Lemann “rough drafts” :
4. Washington Post: May 1989: ‘The Underclass Cycle: Making It—Then and Now’ (2100 words)
https://archive.ph/KPZth
This WaPo essay includes significant statements from Lemann that I'll say more about below.
5. New York Times, Jan. 1991: ‘Four Generations in the Projects’ (6200 words)
https://archive.ph/t1gN3
6. Atlantic Monthly, March 1991: ‘Notes: Healing the Ghettos’ (2700 words)
https://archive.ph/QuVpi
The best synopsis (only 500 words) of The Promised Land was written by Lemann himself to rebut criticism from Mitchell Duneier, who coincidentally was in 1991 Wilson's graduate student & today is chairman of Princeton's sociology department—a bishop in the urban-sociology clerisy to Wilson’s papacy.
I highly recommend reading Duneier’s 620-word complaint: https://archive.ph/0RliV
And Lemann’s rebuttal: https://archive.ph/kzua0
===========================
Lemann is an intellectual historian. In 1996 he told a reporter:
“My feeling is that the possibilities of pure narrative have been exhausted, and that it is not intellectually exciting,” he says. “I think what we [New Journalists] do is to write narrative that serves an idea.” https://archive.ph/pvBx7In his May 1989 WaPo oped cited above (https://archive.ph/KPZth) Lemann makes several fascinating remarks that I wish he had included in TPL. Notice his emphasis upon ideas in these excerpts (my emphases):
“It is impossible to read Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives, published in 1890, without noticing the parallels between Riis’s concerns and those of middle-class reformers in the big cities today.”
“Riis even shared some of the suspicions of present-day conservatives that social programs may add to, rather than diminish, the conditions they seek to alleviate.”
“In Riis’s work . . . there lurks just beneath the surface the idea that ethnicity is destiny. Obviously the same idea , again barely submerged, is around today....”
[My note: Obviously, Lemann rejects Riis's insinuation "that ethnicity is destiny."]
“I don’t mean to argue that all the problems of the ghettos are simply going to go away over time—only that the current atmosphere of fatalism is unwarranted . What will happen is similar to what has happened in the past.”
“The main difference between today’s ghettos and those that Riis wrote about is that there are so many fewer poor husband-wife families today—a difference that does make today’s underclass more intractable but still not totally so.”
“Today, most discussion of the underclass is strongly influenced by the idea that government social programs can’t possibly help.”
Consider this line from Lemann’s WaPo oped:
“ The underclass is cut off from the rest of America, and what it needs is the direct intervention of the whole society , not just black society. A generation from now, the wild pessimism now prevailing about the underclass will seem dated; . . .”
Given that a generation has passed since 1989, one wonders if Lemann would aver that his own prediction—"A generation from now, the wild pessimism now prevailing about the underclass will seem dated"—has, in his own eyes, proven true or false.
===========================
The Promised Land includes Lemann's interesting summaries of other famous peoples' views on race & welfare: William Alexander Percy, John Dollard, Charles S. Johnson, Arthur Raper, E. Franklin Frazier, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Gutman, and Stanley Elkins.
Lemann’s comments spurred me to read (two books by) Hortense Powdermaker, David L. Cohn’s Where I Was Born (a book Nick disparages but I thought good), Drake & Cayton's Black Metropolis, Kenneth Clark's great book Dark Ghetto, Wm. J. Wilson’s The Declining Significance of Race (1978), and Daniel P. Moynihan’s singularly great 17,000-word report “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action” (1965).
TPL got rave reviews worth reading from prominent liberals like C. Vann Woodward, Anthony Lewis, and Garry Wills.
Woodward: https://archive.ph/eiuT1
Lewis: https://archive.ph/e2qQm
Wills: https://archive.ph/CAoh1
===========================
Over the years my sense of the “villain” in TPL has changed. At first I conceived the villain to be farm mechanization. But after more rereading I came to think that the villain was Daniel P. Moynihan — which is funny, because now I’m a huge fan of DPM, Seymour Lipset & Nathan Glazer.
These days I think the most villainous (but well meaning, which makes him diabolical) character in TPL is Nicholas von Hoffman.
But Lemann’s an intellectual historian, so he’s more interested in ideas than individuals, and his goal in this book is to suss out the constellation of ideas animating the choices made by his characters.
In short, the villainous idea besetting The Promised Land is defeatism, fatalism, resignation in the face of decay, lack of political will to deploy government power to ameliorate suffering.
In this sense Lemann himself reminds me of the cohort of progressives whom Perry Miller called (in his introductory essay to American Thought : Civil War To World War I (1954)) "the optimistic Darwinians" (Henry Ward Beecher, Lyman Abbott, Henry George, Lester Ward, Henry Demarest Lloyd) who believed the state’s power should be used to ameliorate suffering.
In contrast, “the pessimistic Darwinians" (William Graham Sumner, Herbert Spencer, Oliver W. Holmes, Jr.) are the kind of people who (like Pontius Pilate) disavow responsibility for outcomes produced by forces beyond their direct control, by (for instance) the market.
In Lemann's view, the ghettos persist because of governmental indifference, defeatism, “a weakness of spirit" (351) that is exemplified by a scene recounted in The Promised Land that took place in 1965 at a cocktail-party, when onto the stage in a walk-on cameo appears
George Kennan, the magisterially gloomy diplomat, [who] said to [Walter] Heller, "I hear you're working on the problem of the poor. The poor are always with you. If you lift up the poor, you'll just create more poor" (134).That anecdote comes, unsurprisingly, from Heller; one wishes that a footnote indicated that Kennan had confirmed it.
In TPL's last chapter Lemann laments that
there seems to be a conviction that we don’t know what can possibly help the ghettos, ... that some unbridgeable gap between blacks and whites makes the amelioration of any problem related to race unlikely. These sentiments ... turn out to be merely resistance to change wearing the garb of pessimism. (343)===========================
. . . the idea that the government can’t accomplish anything is a smokescreen obscuring the useful and encouraging results of a quarter century’s worth of research on antipoverty programs—research of a kind that didn’t exist when the war on poverty began. (349)
The real impediment in the short run is not a lack of political support—which in racial matters always comes after the fact, if it comes at all—but a weakness of spirit. (351)
The danger in the notion of ghetto development is not in the ghettos themselves but in the realm of ideas. ... we should change our reigning idea about what will help most.... (348)
the racial situation as it stands today is not permanent—is not, should not be, will not be. (7)
Kennan—like his anti-imperialist, anti-statist, anti-progressivist forebear, Wm. Graham Sumner (1840-1910)—also vehemently opposed NATO’s expansion in 1998. https://archive.ph/qqVRt
===========================
The best critical review of TPL that I've read is by Thomas Byrne Edsall (The New Republic, May 27, 1991), whom Lemann later hired at Columbia, in service (I guess) of the old adage that one should: Keep your friends close & your best critics even closer.
Edsall wrote:
Lemann is guilty of a huge liberal leap of faith....
Lemann has failed to come to grips with the central dilemma of post-1960s liberalism, which has hurt or put in jeopardy the well-being of precisely the people its [welfare] programs were meant to help....
Liberal advocates of the poor, challenging policies that had once coercively and repressively maintained social order, forced the elimination of regulations governing behavioral norms—that public housing tenants be married, for example. The revolution extending rights to the poor, including the right to refuse menial labor and the right to bear children out of wedlock with no loss of taxpayer-financed support, collided with the values of working- and lower-middle-class voters. The political victim was liberalism.
The very social disorder that Lemann describes as commonplace among the residents of Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes—out-of-wedlock childbearing, welfare dependency, pregnant mothers addicted to cocaine, endemic crime, paternal abandonment—has forced to the forefront of the national policy debate a confrontation between liberals and conservatives over values and rights. This confrontation, in turn, has split the traditional liberal coalition down the middle, and has driven the country sharply to the right.
Not only have the behavior patterns that Lemann describes provoked a conflict over values that has damaged liberalism; those patterns have themselves challenged the legitimacy and efficacy of liberal initiatives. During the 1960s and 1970s, when the civil rights movement produced the broadest reforms in the nation's history, and when social spending to fight poverty, to improve schools, and to feed the hungry rose sharply, the rates of crime, unwed motherhood, welfare dependency, and chronic black urban unemployment also began to skyrocket. These trends posed a dilemma that continues to plague what can broadly be described as the American left.
At the same time, a disproportionate dependence on government jobs—over half of the blacks with professional and managerial-level jobs work for the government, compared with just over a quarter of such whites—has, in turn, imposed significant costs on middle-class blacks themselves. For this dependence has profound political ramifications. It has left the black community vulnerable to the ideological vagaries of the electorate, and voter attitudes toward the public sector have become increasingly vulnerable to conservative and Republican racial polarization strategies that capitalize, in part, on the fact that government employment is increasingly black. Black middle-class dependence on government employment dovetails with disproportionate black use of government welfare services.
_______________________________
Lemann writes in TPL:
There was a longstanding feud at the University of Chicago between the sociology department and the School of Social Service Administration. The social workers, strongly influenced by Freudian psychology, saw the slums as a mass of individual problems rooted in poor early-childhood development; to the sociologists, the slums were a part of a vast urban organism, and their problems were a natural part of the life of the city. (120)In that feud Lemann sides with the sociologists but I'd side with the Freudians.
Lemann's informants tell him of several instances of sexual abuse. When 18-year-old Connie Henry begins sexual relations with 15-year-old Johnnie Haynes (244), I was struck by what appeared to be Connie's reenactment of the same predatory sexuality that was once forced upon her. None of Lemann's informants, nor Lemann himself, saw fit to comment upon what looked to me like a cycle of sexual abuse.
===========================
Lemann mocks the widely-held, seemingly "irresistibly appealing" notion
that the problems of the ghettos are new, the idea that they can be solved in a single dramatic stroke—by [1] welfare reform, or by [2] the emergence of new black leaders (or white leaders), or by [3] the construction of more jails, or by [4] eliminating drugs, or by [5] changing the schools (346-7).
Notice that among the five "irresistibly appealing" (347) popular beliefs that Lemann mocks as explanations for the problems besetting the ghetto, one particularly popular belief the he cited in his rough drafts & opeds is not mentioned among the popular, "irresistibly appealing" explanations: single female-headed-households.
In his opeds and rough drafts Lemann does cite single-parent-headed households as a contributing factor to ghettos, but not in his book—perhaps due to pressure from the academic clerisy?
August 16, 2007
Other than the 1960s riots, and the evacuation of ethnic whites from rust belt cities, the "Great Black Migration" is widely unknown to Americans who are not black. I got this book years ago for a class in college, and I didn't read it back then, of course, but I was rummaging through old stuff and found it, and read it. And it was like a book version of a PBS miniseries. Very well crafted and informative, with compelling narratives all the way round. It made me feel 1) kind of mad that I knew so little about such a major part of recent American history; and 2) glad I went to college where some very intelligent professor assigned me this book to read. So Prof. Haugwout, I finally got to reading it about 5 years late.
May 3, 2010
I first read Nicholas Lemann’s excellent The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America many years ago and at the time it was a revelation to me, in its unsparing account of the self-interested machinations of the white political elite in Washington, as well as its look at how cotton culture in the South indelibly marked race relations in the North of the United States.
Re-reading it recently, in light of the 2008 Presidential election, made me think about how certain things have changed a great deal in this country, though sadly, some things have remained rather similar. It’s still a bad place to be a poor person, particularly a poor person of color!
Re-reading it recently, in light of the 2008 Presidential election, made me think about how certain things have changed a great deal in this country, though sadly, some things have remained rather similar. It’s still a bad place to be a poor person, particularly a poor person of color!
September 15, 2015
I read this book ages ago, but it came up in conversation this evening. So when I was reminded of it, I wanted to put it on my "read" shelf, so that I could remember it in the future. It is an amazing book, a compelling narrative, written beautifully, an important piece of American history. Well worth the read. I would highly recommend this book to anybody.
April 9, 2018
This was a thoughtful and well-written book describing a phenomenon forming the background of modern American society. Most black people living in the northern states have extended family in the southern states, the social and economic dynamics of the Great Migration are the reason why. The fallout of the Great Migration does a great deal to explain the association of entrenched and generational poverty with "black" areas, as do social programs which didn't function as well as planned, and/or were gutted by societal backlash in the form of conservative policies. Desegregation and associated measures such as Affirmative Action and school system bussing were also a double-edged sword: while this enabled some middle class and wealthy blacks to live and work among white society to a greater degree and to have opportunities they did not have before, it took away potential job creators and role models from "the ghetto", and encouraged a culture in which "flight" rather than attempting to fix economic and social problems in a given area is the accepted norm to such a degree that young kids in school who have professional or middle class aspirations discuss the necessity of "getting out" of the area they are in (if it is considered ghetto) in order to acheive these goals.
August 28, 2014
This is a very informative look at the lives of African Americans who participated in the Great Migration from the South to the North. Lemann focuses on three people from Clarksdale, Mississippi who moved to Chicago, so the book is narrower than its subtitle suggests. This focus allows Lemann to examine in detail the urban policies of successive Chicago city governments, particularly those of long-term mayor Richard Daley. He also revisits Clarksdale to discuss the changes that have taken place over the decades. A large chunk of the book provides an excellent overview of federal government policies aimed at alleviating inner-city poverty, especially the Johnson administration's War on Poverty, along with an exposition of sociological theories about African American family structure, poverty, and urban crime. Although it lacked the emotional punch of Isabel Wilkerson's magnificent 'The Warmth of Other Suns', I found 'The Promised Land' indispensable reading.
April 3, 2022
This was an excellent book written in 1991. It follows a few people from the South to Chicago. It also covers the efforts be the Federal government on how to correct the issue by combating poverty. It covers many different approaches, books, reports, etc. on how to fix the issues in the ghetto. The author states provides some optimism but understands the limits how how it can be achieved. I'd love to read this again.
September 21, 2020
I read “The Promised Land” 25 years ago for a better understanding of the repressive social and economic forces that drove 5 million black people from the rural South to ugly new urban challenges in the North between 1940 and 1970. Now, rereading Lemann’s book in crisis-wracked 2020 helps remind us how we got where we are.
July 25, 2017
One of the few books I've kept because I thought it was so important.
May 21, 2022
Yes it’s a twenty year old book written about 50, 60, 70, and 80 year old events and too many times the words can still apply. An incredible book … informative and well crafted.
May 10, 2020
So, I had to read this book for my seminar class & honestly I’m glad I did.
If you’re interested in different, more personal accounts of Blacks who embarked on journey to the Promised Land that was anywhere but the South, this book is definitely for you. The people that the author mentions in particular left cotton plantations & small towns of the Mississippi Delta to go to Chicago. Lemann also takes the time to explain legislation changes that were happening in Washington DC, but honestly I skimmed a majority of that chapter because it was boring; I’ve been studying nothing but legislation for my paper & I felt like it messed up the flow of the book (however, I understand the importance of legislation when it comes to the Second Great Migration).
I loved this book. It’s divided into 6 chapters (including an afterward) & the family dramas WILL SUCK YOU IN!!! However, some parts are extremely sad & disappointing (but unsurprising). The North honestly WAS NOT all what people had it cracked up to be; it was only the money that was good. Drug & gang culture are major themes & witnessing first hand their downfalls was just down right heartbreaking. I honestly have greater empathy toward those involved within those cultures… I vaguely understand why & how they fall into the trap. I say vaguely because I know that I will never fully understand nor comprehend what I have never experienced.
It gives you a new appreciation of how some of our people were willing to do whatever it took to achieve the white American dream.
If you’re interested in different, more personal accounts of Blacks who embarked on journey to the Promised Land that was anywhere but the South, this book is definitely for you. The people that the author mentions in particular left cotton plantations & small towns of the Mississippi Delta to go to Chicago. Lemann also takes the time to explain legislation changes that were happening in Washington DC, but honestly I skimmed a majority of that chapter because it was boring; I’ve been studying nothing but legislation for my paper & I felt like it messed up the flow of the book (however, I understand the importance of legislation when it comes to the Second Great Migration).
I loved this book. It’s divided into 6 chapters (including an afterward) & the family dramas WILL SUCK YOU IN!!! However, some parts are extremely sad & disappointing (but unsurprising). The North honestly WAS NOT all what people had it cracked up to be; it was only the money that was good. Drug & gang culture are major themes & witnessing first hand their downfalls was just down right heartbreaking. I honestly have greater empathy toward those involved within those cultures… I vaguely understand why & how they fall into the trap. I say vaguely because I know that I will never fully understand nor comprehend what I have never experienced.
It gives you a new appreciation of how some of our people were willing to do whatever it took to achieve the white American dream.
December 25, 2019
“To be born in the ghettos is to be consigned to a date no American should have to suffer. The more clearly we can be made to see that and to understand the causes of the situation, the less likely it is that we will let it stand”
The author wrote it in the early 1990s, I wonder what his thoughts are now. Following families from Clarksdale, Mississippi, in the 1950s, to their ghetto-living lives in Chicago, then return to Clarksdale with some of them decades later. In the meantime, tracing the policies of the JFK, LBJ, and Nixon. I wonder whether the much later book (which I like better) Isabel Wilkerson’s “the warmth of other sun” was inspired by Lemann’s book.
It is depressing to read almost 30 years later and see nothing much have changed.
The author wrote it in the early 1990s, I wonder what his thoughts are now. Following families from Clarksdale, Mississippi, in the 1950s, to their ghetto-living lives in Chicago, then return to Clarksdale with some of them decades later. In the meantime, tracing the policies of the JFK, LBJ, and Nixon. I wonder whether the much later book (which I like better) Isabel Wilkerson’s “the warmth of other sun” was inspired by Lemann’s book.
It is depressing to read almost 30 years later and see nothing much have changed.
May 29, 2020
A thorough account of the African American migration from the South - especially the Delta (Clarksdale) to the North (mostly Chicago). Well written, expertly weaving personal accounts with politics and government policies of the time. The big section in Washington is a fascinating account of an important part of 1960s politics drawing on LBJ and B Kennedy’s loathing of each other.
Detailing the causes and effects of the ghettos and despair of public housing (the projects) in Chicago was illuminating and tragic tale borne directly out of racism and lack of equal opportunity for African Americans. The flow on effect to the breakdown of family structures, unemployment, substance abuse and crime was catastrophic.
Detailing the causes and effects of the ghettos and despair of public housing (the projects) in Chicago was illuminating and tragic tale borne directly out of racism and lack of equal opportunity for African Americans. The flow on effect to the breakdown of family structures, unemployment, substance abuse and crime was catastrophic.
September 29, 2018
I think this seems like an excellent book - I just can't seem to finish it. I've had it out from the library for months and have only read bits at a time. I do enjoy how much it talks about policy in addition to anecdotal data, but I keep wondering what has changed in the last 20-30 years. I'd like to pick it up again later.
October 10, 2025
Study of Black migration
A really eye opening to the great migration that took place here in the United States, especially from Mississippi. Not what I expected, but certainly a look back in history and certainly explains our race relations and economics of the poor today.
A really eye opening to the great migration that took place here in the United States, especially from Mississippi. Not what I expected, but certainly a look back in history and certainly explains our race relations and economics of the poor today.
February 19, 2021
I think that this book is dated; it was published 30 years ago and while the history is interesting (although somewhat stolidly written), the conclusions don't work now. At least, I don't believe that black ghettoes are the most important issue in our country right now. I'll give you race relations, but not at all in his context.
I did find his analysis of LBJ and Robert Kennedy particularly interesting. I also learned a lot about the connections between the cotton picker and the minimum wage that together ended Black agrarian labor in the South.
I did find his analysis of LBJ and Robert Kennedy particularly interesting. I also learned a lot about the connections between the cotton picker and the minimum wage that together ended Black agrarian labor in the South.
September 3, 2009
This book written in the early 1990's traces the black migration to Chicago from Mississippi and is a fascinating read. Lemann uses three or four different families to trace what happened when the cotton picking machine made sharecropper labor in the cotton fields obsolete. He also covers very well the public programs instituted to relieve the ghettos, most of which did not work very well and he explains why the programs did not work well.
March 27, 2012
There is a newer book on this subject, but this one was highly recommended by a friend. One of the best discussions I’ve had with my book groups came from reading this book about the massive migration North resulting from the mechanization of cotton farming between 1940-1970. One of the main reasons to read the book now is to try to understand the continuing "debate over the root causes of the persistence of an underclass." - Roz (quotation from publisher's summary)
February 11, 2011
More about the black migration from the south . . . this book focuses more on government programs, and the positive and negative aspects for the people who made that move. Interesting that he tells the story of three people, too, as in the Warmth of Other Suns. The main difference: this is the voice of a white male 20 years ago. WOS is the voice of a young black woman today.
August 5, 2017
In addition to the individual stories of migration, this book gives a good overview of affordable housing programs of the 70s & 80s, as well as background information on Chicago's best-known housing projects. A good starting point for further study on affordable housing legislation and the roles of community action programs.
February 26, 2010
A riveting account of the mass exodus of African Americans to the north during the middle part of the 20th century and the resulting cultural shift it created. An example of nonfiction at its most intriguing and finest.
January 25, 2025
Thirty-four years have passed since this book was published, but it’s still useful and relevant. The author’s career included editorships at the Texas Monthly, the Washington Post the Atlantic Monthly, and The New Yorker. His books have won awards, he was named as a Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science in 2019, and he serves as the Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. With journalism as his perspective, he authored this book, subtitled The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America, combining history, sociology, and political science.
On the one hand, his study is granular. He examines details of a few individuals and families, whom he follows over some 70 years from their lives as sharecroppers picking and hoeing cotton in the Mississippi Delta to their years in Chicago’s Southside and Westside ghettos. One becomes a welfare mother and grandmother, one becomes a manager of ghetto apartment buildings, and one becomes a storefront preacher.
Meanwhile, he turns the spotlight on national politics, starting with President Kennedy and then, especially, President Lyndon Johnson along with Robert F. Kennedy. What could these leaders do, not only about the persistent issues of segregation in the South, but about poverty in the fast-growing Black ghettos of America’s industrial cities? I found it fascinating to read about bureaucratic infighting among such figures as Sargent Shriver, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Willard Wirtz, and Joseph Califano, and others whose prominence grew for years after these stories.
Similarly, Lemann reports on the tensions within the Civil Rights movement as well as between that movement and Black nationalism or Black Power. The background of these tensions is the sharp disagreement between Booker T. Washington, the former slave who founded the Tuskegee Institute, and W.E.B. DuBois, who came from a free Black family. Washington had no confidence in government solutions to Black poverty; instead, he concentrated on self-help by teaching skills that would help sharecroppers become more self-sufficient. DuBois, a leader in the NAACP, fought for legal equality and desegregation, and he believed that the government needed to facilitate achieving these goals.
Along with these conflicts, there were the tensions between federal programs and local politics, namely the machine run by Mayor Daley of Chicago. Although Daley acquiesced to segregation, he built schools and low-cost housing for the Black people migrating by the thousands to Chicago. He welcomed federal support but not at the expense of his control over the budgets and programs involved.
As time passes in the narrative from sharecropping days to the migration to the urban North, Black ghettos evolve into being “among the worst places to live in the world.” However, a key factor in this decline is that those who get education and training and then jobs and increased income leave the ghetto to join the Black middle class. If the ghettos aren’t shrinking, it’s because the birth rate there outpaces the death rate.
I chose to read The Promised Land because I’m interested in the changes and challenges of race relations not only in the South but in the cities. I learned much about the rise of the Black middle class as part of the mainstream population of America, and about the isolation of the ghettos, cut off from the rest of the Black population. Overall, the quality of life for Black Americans has improved since the days of slavery, since the days of Jim Crow laws and legalized segregation, and since the prevalence of sharecropping. But the quality of life in the ghettos is as bad or worse than any of those periods.
Many of the efforts that the federal government has made have contributed to this progress. For example, Head Start programs have made a measurable difference in the likelihood of success for a Black child. The one effort that has been a miserable failure is housing, especially the rows of high-rise apartments that are dangerous and almost unmanageable. If, in the 34 years since his book was published, ghetto life is as horrible as ever, Lemann would say it’s because of “a loss of moral urgency.” (p. 353)
Soon I plan to read a book more recent by 19 years with the same theme—The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, by Isabel Wilkerson. It will be interesting to compare her views to those of Lemann.
May 12, 2018
Bureaucracy is a virtuous and noble thing to cover. You have to know that most readers will find your prose mind-numbingly dry, borderline unreadable at times because of the tesseract of jargon you have to spin to communicate some ideas clearly. If you’re a normal beat reporter anyways.
But then there’s very little that’s normal about Nicholas Lemann’s career. I don’t think being a former staff writer for The New Yorker qualifies as ‘normal’ in anyone’s book. It takes something extraordinary to whip and churn bureaucratic slush into something not just digestible but satisfying to the average reader. Lemann does that in The Promised Land, with mixed success.
What he has working for him is an incredible gift for putting a face to the consequences of decisions made within government. There’s no question that people like Ruby and her children had their whole lives defined by policies spun up by everyone from Mayor Daley to Lyndon B. Johnson. That goal is further abetted by the structure of the book, which bungies from Clarksville to Chicago to Washington and back through in reverse order. You get a real sense of the distance between the people most acutely affected and those doing the sausage-making. To that point, Lemann doesn’t just point out the Office of Economic Opportunity’s concrete actions, but how its behavior spun out from the conniving of different factions in the Johnson administration. On the whole, the book provides a great birds-eye view of the machinations surrounding the Great Migration.
That being said, the deep dive into the philosophies of even small players in the Great Society can become dizzying. Some sections require multiple passes just to get the bare essence of what a single person was thinking, and that can feel like a betrayal when that character disappears for 30 deep, dense pages - only to reemerge and take you by surprise when you realize you’ve completely forgotten their name. The writing in the middle of the ‘Washington’ chapter becomes so disorienting that I have to admit, I just can’t comment intelligently on anything it discussed for whole sections. That could be forgiven if done once, but he repeats this mistake three times if you include the two different chapters on Chicago, where he discusses the Democratic political machine and the leaders in the Civil Rights movement. At that point, it becomes a cardinal sin. This incredibly clinical probing wouldn’t be a problem if it were one of the ten page New Yorker pieces that are Lemann’s bread and butter, but New Yorker pieces were never meant to stretch to 350 pages (in my honest opinion, anyhow). Concision would have been Lemann’s ally here.
Overall, The Promised Land has an incredible ability to draw the reader in when discussing the real pulse underlying its story: the people, the ones that moved into basement kitchenettes looking for a better life and were sucked into the projects over time. The problems with the book are all the parts I can’t remember.
But then there’s very little that’s normal about Nicholas Lemann’s career. I don’t think being a former staff writer for The New Yorker qualifies as ‘normal’ in anyone’s book. It takes something extraordinary to whip and churn bureaucratic slush into something not just digestible but satisfying to the average reader. Lemann does that in The Promised Land, with mixed success.
What he has working for him is an incredible gift for putting a face to the consequences of decisions made within government. There’s no question that people like Ruby and her children had their whole lives defined by policies spun up by everyone from Mayor Daley to Lyndon B. Johnson. That goal is further abetted by the structure of the book, which bungies from Clarksville to Chicago to Washington and back through in reverse order. You get a real sense of the distance between the people most acutely affected and those doing the sausage-making. To that point, Lemann doesn’t just point out the Office of Economic Opportunity’s concrete actions, but how its behavior spun out from the conniving of different factions in the Johnson administration. On the whole, the book provides a great birds-eye view of the machinations surrounding the Great Migration.
That being said, the deep dive into the philosophies of even small players in the Great Society can become dizzying. Some sections require multiple passes just to get the bare essence of what a single person was thinking, and that can feel like a betrayal when that character disappears for 30 deep, dense pages - only to reemerge and take you by surprise when you realize you’ve completely forgotten their name. The writing in the middle of the ‘Washington’ chapter becomes so disorienting that I have to admit, I just can’t comment intelligently on anything it discussed for whole sections. That could be forgiven if done once, but he repeats this mistake three times if you include the two different chapters on Chicago, where he discusses the Democratic political machine and the leaders in the Civil Rights movement. At that point, it becomes a cardinal sin. This incredibly clinical probing wouldn’t be a problem if it were one of the ten page New Yorker pieces that are Lemann’s bread and butter, but New Yorker pieces were never meant to stretch to 350 pages (in my honest opinion, anyhow). Concision would have been Lemann’s ally here.
Overall, The Promised Land has an incredible ability to draw the reader in when discussing the real pulse underlying its story: the people, the ones that moved into basement kitchenettes looking for a better life and were sucked into the projects over time. The problems with the book are all the parts I can’t remember.
July 22, 2021
Nicholas Lemann’s The Promised Land was in some ways a difficult read. Especially tedious was his explanation of the building of the political machine in Chicago. As a native Chicagoan, I am very familiar with the political gamers, but some outsiders might be a bit bored with the detailed explanations, and trying to keep up with all the players involved. Lemann does a good job explaining the nexus of the problem of racism that has, and continues to, plague cities like Chicago, and its direct ties to slavery that has caused generations of disjointed family units. He also rightly points out that people are responsible for their own actions and reap the consequences thereof.
My parents migrated to Chicago from Louisiana and Arkansas in the 1940s and I have an abiding interest in the impact made by the Great Migration on families and how communities in Chicago were shaped as a direct result. I read Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Many Suns a few years ago and I feel Lemann’s book, while not as easy to read, filled in some of the historical gaps for me. It may not be fair to compare the two books, however, since both contain narratives of specific families who migrated, I will compare them. The narratives found in Wilkerson’s book are interesting and detailed, and it was easier to follow the timeline of the families or individuals as they left the South and settled in their respective northern cities. Lemann’s family narratives are not as fluid, being interrupted frequently for explanations of what political figures and policies were in play at the time. While there was some need-to-know information, I was constantly having to remind myself of who was being spoken about, where they came from, and why it mattered.
All in all, I enjoyed The Promised Land because of the subject matter. If you want to read a book on the history of the Great Migration and its effect on race relations, this book is solid. If you want to read actual narratives about families who left the South and migrated North, read Wilkerson’s book instead.
My parents migrated to Chicago from Louisiana and Arkansas in the 1940s and I have an abiding interest in the impact made by the Great Migration on families and how communities in Chicago were shaped as a direct result. I read Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Many Suns a few years ago and I feel Lemann’s book, while not as easy to read, filled in some of the historical gaps for me. It may not be fair to compare the two books, however, since both contain narratives of specific families who migrated, I will compare them. The narratives found in Wilkerson’s book are interesting and detailed, and it was easier to follow the timeline of the families or individuals as they left the South and settled in their respective northern cities. Lemann’s family narratives are not as fluid, being interrupted frequently for explanations of what political figures and policies were in play at the time. While there was some need-to-know information, I was constantly having to remind myself of who was being spoken about, where they came from, and why it mattered.
All in all, I enjoyed The Promised Land because of the subject matter. If you want to read a book on the history of the Great Migration and its effect on race relations, this book is solid. If you want to read actual narratives about families who left the South and migrated North, read Wilkerson’s book instead.
April 28, 2024
Nicholas Lemann is talented at writing nonfiction historical narrative. This work, ostensibly a story of the Black Great Migration and of the War on Poverty efforts to address Black inner-city slums (but particularly those in Chicago), has real strengths in the stories that it tells on the zoomed-in level of individuals and families who lived through the migration north.
It also has weaknesses. It's not easy to walk away with a big-picture impression of the overall sense of what happened in the weeds of all the details that Lemann tells.
This is the second book I've read by Lemann, and they both featured this quality.
Also, this book is more than 30 years old, so the story that it tells is a dated one.
I liked this book better than the other title I attempted to read about the Great Migration (namely, "The Warmth of Other Suns," which I could not finish), but "The Promised Land" is not exactly a work that I would recommend to others to read, even though the lives of the people told in the book are memorable and will likely stick with me.
It also has weaknesses. It's not easy to walk away with a big-picture impression of the overall sense of what happened in the weeds of all the details that Lemann tells.
This is the second book I've read by Lemann, and they both featured this quality.
Also, this book is more than 30 years old, so the story that it tells is a dated one.
I liked this book better than the other title I attempted to read about the Great Migration (namely, "The Warmth of Other Suns," which I could not finish), but "The Promised Land" is not exactly a work that I would recommend to others to read, even though the lives of the people told in the book are memorable and will likely stick with me.
March 6, 2025
Before Judgment, Walk A Mile In Their Shoes
My parents, children of the 20s, baptized by the neglect of the 30s and bloodshed of the WWII years, proclaimed - loudly - that they were not racist. But, they never personally got to know a black person and didn’t really want to. I was raised at the beach in Los Angeles and never knew an African-American either - until college. For me, that changed a lot and I’ve been reading to increase my understanding of Black reality ever since.
This book is long and ponderous at times but the story is there for the taking. It is more approachable for the telling of the Great Migration story - before, during and after - through the eyes of a handful of real people who lived that reality.
It won’t be my most enjoyable read of 2025, but I’ll wager it is one of the most important.
My parents, children of the 20s, baptized by the neglect of the 30s and bloodshed of the WWII years, proclaimed - loudly - that they were not racist. But, they never personally got to know a black person and didn’t really want to. I was raised at the beach in Los Angeles and never knew an African-American either - until college. For me, that changed a lot and I’ve been reading to increase my understanding of Black reality ever since.
This book is long and ponderous at times but the story is there for the taking. It is more approachable for the telling of the Great Migration story - before, during and after - through the eyes of a handful of real people who lived that reality.
It won’t be my most enjoyable read of 2025, but I’ll wager it is one of the most important.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 70 reviews