The Promised Land, by Nicholas Lemann
The Racial Dilemma
The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How it Changed America.
by Nicholas Lemann.
Knopf. 410 pp. $24.95.
The seeming intractability of black poverty has vexed our political life for nearly 30 years, ever since inner-city riots jolted Americans out of the assumption that the country’s race problems had been put to rest by the adoption of federal laws outlawing legal segregation. Complicating matters have been the various taboos placed on discussion of racial affairs—most notably the black family structure—along with a tendency to confuse the anxieties of the black middle class with the much more troubling predicament of the black poor, and a continuing penchant among blacks and liberal whites to ascribe America’s racial dilemma almost exclusively to white racism. Part of the appeal of Nicholas Lemann’s much-praised book may lie, in fact, in the refreshing intellectual honesty and reasonableness he brings to the story he has to tell, characteristics which stand in marked contrast to the dissembling and arrant dishonesty so often encountered in the debate over racial policy.
The Promised Land is organized around the lives of individual blacks, from their origins in Clarksdale, Mississippi, a cotton sharecropping center which provided thousands of recruits for the migration northward, to their experiences in the Chicago ghetto where many came to settle. It is in the biographies of Ruby Haynes, Uless Carter, and George Hicks that Lemann’s considerable journalistic talents are most sparklingly on display. The individual experiences he narrates, along with his cogent observations on the culture of Mississippi sharecropper society, drive home a crucial point: that the roots of today’s urban crisis can be traced to the pattern of black social existence in the segregated Deep South.
As Lemann relates it, the “tangle of pathology” to which Daniel Patrick Moynihan referred in his ill-fated 1965 report on the black family was clearly in evidence in the lives 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 junc