The Promised Land

February 4, 1991
As cotton farming became increasingly mechanized, an estimated five million blacks migrated from the rural South to the urban North between 1940 and 1970. Lemann, Atlantic contributing editor, re-creates this vast migration in microcosm by focusing on a handful of blacks who left the Mississippi Delta for Chicago's slums. Intertwined with their personal stories are several subplots: high-level wrangling in JFK's and LBJ's war on poverty; Chicago Mayor Richard Daley applying the ?? brake to integration efforts; the raging debate over the root causes of the persistence of an underclass; the crumbling of an interracial, nonviolent civil rights movement and its replacement by the furtherance of black programs as a black cause. One of Lemann's main aims is to refute the widespread belief that all the federal government's past efforts to help the black poor failed. He sketches a framework for a wholesale assault on poverty. This compellingly dramatic, vivid document speaks to the nation's racial conscience. 40,000 first printing; BOMC, History Book Club and QPB alternates.