of Negroes of the Jim Crow-era Mississippi Delta, in large measure due to the state of dependency imposed by segregation and the plantation economy. Out-of-wedlock births were commonplace and life revolved around fornication, petty crime, fighting, and the consumption of illegal alcohol. Men proved unreliable as husbands and providers. Ruby Haynes, who endured a series of unfortunate romantic liaisons after moving to Chicago, recalls only one happy marriage among her Clarksdale friends, and that only on the third try.
By this account, then, the high percentage of female-headed families among inner-city blacks is not the result of the destruction of a once-stable family structure by the relentless pressures of city life and Northern prejudice, but a case of a bad situation migrating from one region of the country to another, and made much worse by the absence of those uniquely black institutions which had brought a measure of cohesion to Negro society in the South.
To those Southern blacks who fled North—driven from their homes by the mechanization of the cotton industry and encouraged by white segregationists—a city like Chicago seemed very much like the biblical promised land, a place of fabulous wealth where jobs and dignity awaited. Initially, those jobs were not only easy to come by, they were ideally suited to uneducated farm boys seeking a decent living by performing unskilled labor in the stockyards, meat plants, and steel factories.
Eventually, however, the march of technology all but eliminated these typically blue-collar jobs. Like the sociologist William Julius Wilson, Lemann sees in the decline of smokestack America a crucial factor in the failure of blacks to rise with the relative ease of other immigrant groups. This is a debatable point. The 60’s ghetto explosions, after all, took place during a period of high growth, nearly full employment, and dramatic reduction in poverty, a time when the maxim, “a rising tide lifts all the boats,” seemed altogether appropriate. Yet it was precisely at this juncture, when semi-skilled unionized jobs were readily available and blacks were being hired in unprecedented numbers, that America was informed that its inner cities were seething with fury and economic despair.
Still, Lemann hardly restricts himself to economic factors in explaining the dire straits of the black poor. He is keenly sensitive to so-called cultural factors, including family structure, in the growth of the black underclass and of the devastating phenomenon he labels black racial isolation. Nor, in analyzing the dynamics of that isolation, does Lemann stress white prejudice. Instead, he emphasizes a series of political decisions taken both by those resisting any change in the black condition and, paradoxically, by liberals who saw themselves as radical advocates of black progress.
Exhibit A is federally sponsored low-income housing. In Chicago, high-rise housing projects were not initially perceived as a program exclusively for blacks; it was only after a series of violent confrontations over extremely modest attempts at neighborhood integration that a decision was made to limit construction to the ghetto. Yet few people objected to this policy, least of all the prospective black tenants, who saw the new buildings as offering a quality of life beyond their wildest imaginings. Ruby Haynes, who had lived in a series of slum buildings since moving to Chicago, recalls the day in 1962 when she moved into a newly-built project as one of the happiest in her life.
The enthusiasm for the projects was not unjustified, for up until that time low-income housing was a government program that seemed to work. This was owing in no small part to the scrupulous attention paid to the screening of tenant applicants in order to keep the projects free of criminals and the unruly. To gain approval for her application, Ruby Haynes actually married her common-law husband because of a regulation barring the admission of unwed mothers. But it was precisely at this time that the standards for admission and tenant behavior began t