The Promised Land:
The Great Black Migration
and How it Changed America
By Nicholas Lemann
Knopf, 320 pages, $24.95
On Oct. 12, 1962, Luther and Ruby Haynes moved their family into the Robert Taylor Homes. Anticipating a bright future, the family eyed the landscaping crew planting grass and the janitors lending assistance to incoming tenants. Twelve-year-old Larry Haynes shared his parents` excitement: ”I thought that was the beautifullest place in the world,” he recalled a quarter of a century later.
No reader of a Chicago newspaper needs a narrative of the family`s subsequent fortunes to anticipate the tragic outcome. What Nicholas Lemann offers in ”The Promised Land” is a window into the relationship between such personal and family odysseys and the history of public policy. Lemann takes us into the lives of men and women who for the sake of our edification generously opened doors to their painful family and personal past.
We begin in the cotton fields and towns of the mid-century Mississippi Delta, follow displaced black Southerners to Chicago and then parachute into the corridors of power in Washington. After an extended discussion of the origins and administration of Lyndon Johnson`s War on Poverty, Lemann returns us to its clients, first in Chicago and then in Clarksdale, Miss.
The historical context is straightforward: the mechanization of cotton cultivation in the late 1940s, which rendered blacks virtually superfluous to the plantation economy; the migration of approximately 4 million black Southerners to cities in the North and West between 1940 and 1970; the end of legal segregation in the South; World War II and its expansive impact on urban labor markets; the rise and decline of a ”liberal consensus” in Washington; and the collapse of the manufacturing economy in Chicago and other Rust Belt cities.
The protoganists fall mainly into two groups: policy makers in Washington, D.C., and African-Americans living in the Mississippi Delta and Chicago. From Mississippi we follow Ruby Daniels (Haynes), Uless Carter and George Hicks to Chicago. There we meet Luther Haynes, Connie Henry and others, all linked by their Southern roots and by their roles in the unstable world of Ruby Haynes. In this story there are no stable institutions; even Rev. Uless Carter`s church can`t stay in the same place or maintain a stable
congregation.
Nuclear families are especially chaotic. Southern sharecroppers, according to Lemann, brought with them to Chicago a culture characterized by family ”disorganization” that was less viable in Northern cities than in the rural South. In the crucible of high-rise housing projects and an increasingly isolated ghetto (African-Americans able to find stable jobs and establish stable families moved out), these ”underclass” families became increasingly susceptible to drug and alcohol abuse, gang culture and complete alienation from ”mainstream” institutions.
Much of this is familiar. And Lemann`s emphasis on the destructive implications of Southern black rural culture, while toned down from his influential 1986 Atlantic Monthly essays, will continue to rankle historians more familiar with research on the black South since the Civil War.
Comparison with other studies of the Great Migration raise additional questions: why, for example, do Lemann`s migrants differ from the rural Southerners who moved north during the first stages of the ”Great Migration” during World War I, arriving with all the ”right” values? Perhaps what Lemann attributes to the culture of black sharecroppers might be attributable to something else.
At issue is the controversial question of the importance of race in American society. The continued and overwhelming influence of ideologies of race-thinking about race and identification with racial categories-is undeniable. But sociologists and historians vigorously debate the relative prominence of race and class as broad historical factors and as determinants of the historical experiences and life chances of African-Americans.
Lemann`s argument, despite references to important changes in labor markets, relies not on the mere centrality of race but on its singularity as a historical and sociological force. But race relations cannot be understood in isolation from class relations. Lemann confuses sharecropping, a class relationship, with segregation, a system of race relations inextricably intertwined with Southern labor systems.
Other than identifying an ”underclass,” Lemann refers to class only in term of divisions within the black community. He identifies economic factors as central to the social fabric in the North and the South, but the only form of social relations he chooses to name hinges on race; the ”system” is defined in terms of ”seregation” or ”caste.”
Thus ”The Promised Land” is about a ”race problem” carried from the South to the North by the Great Migration. In the rural South of the 1940s, Lemann writes, one could find ”the equivalent of big city ghetto society today”: female-headed families, out-of-wedlock childbearing, the nation`s worst public schools and high rates of violent crime, sexually transmitted disease and substance abuse. Chicago reacted by adapting ”Southern” ways of coping with this transplanted race problem. The concepts of segregation and caste frame Lemann`s discussion of relations between the migrants and the rest of the city.
With the ”race problem” now national, Lemann shifts attention to Washington and Lyndon Johnson`s War on Poverty. Its centerpiece, the Office of Economic Opportunity, funded Community Action Programs that called for
”maximum feasible participation” at the community level. Here, says Lemann, is a fundamental flaw. Hastily conceived and prematurely oversized, community action programs inevitably attracted opposition from bypassed local officials and ”mainstream” Americans offended by the rhetoric and style of newly ”empowered” organizers.
LBJ was a consensus politician; he instinctively questioned community action, with its confrontational style, pluralistic impulses and insensitivity to the prerogatives of local political establishments. But for reasons related to his insecurity and obsession with the Kennedys and liberal opinion-makers, Johnson went along. Ironically, neither community action nor much else of Johnson`s program had deep roots in the Kennedy administration. Lemann`s JFK was lukewarm to civil rights and anti-poverty programs; his closest aides embraced these issues only after 1963, as part of their cultivation of a legend of Kennedy liberalism. Johnson is the hero, ”speaking from the heart” about racial equality and economic opportunity.
Lemann`s argument corrects fashionable Washington-bashing. The War on Poverty helped many people to survive and others to move into the middle class. Lemann`s anecdotal evidence corroborates more systematic data which demonstrates that welfare kept people from starving but did not provide the impetus for teenage pregnancy, family dissolution or alienation from mainstream institutions.
Lemann calls for a new federal War on Poverty. African-Americans have won major gains-emancipation and the destruction of legal segregation-only when the national government has played a major role. He rejects the legacy of community action-attempts to create thriving communities in the ghetto-calling instead for programs that will help African-Americans follow other ethnic groups out of the ghetto and into the ”mainstream.”
That mainstream is absent from ghetto life, Lemann claims. Its only entry point is the television set, more a source of frustration than socialization. He looks (romantically, in light of recent historical research) for cops on the beat, fathers who go to work and return home each night, precinct captains and other ”assimilative” social forces. There is, despite the refusal of academics or policymakers to use term, a ”culture of poverty,” says Lemann, and only federal programs can untangle it.
Federal intervention is not only necessary but also politically feasible. ”Racial programs” have never required broad support; opposition would be slight because costs would be low (the expensive jobs program slips away here) and neither confrontational nor punitive measures are necessary. America`s
”racial conscience” will respond to ”moral urgency” as it reacted to Harriet Beecher Stowe in the 1850s and Martin Luther King a century later.
But Lemann`s assumptions are problematic. First, the parallels to ”Uncle Tom`s Cabin” and King require that there be such provocative opponents as the slave-power conspiracy and violent die-hard segregationists. Second, a material basis for broad mobility out of the ghetto requires some attention to industrial policy. Third, there is no mention of unions, which were critical to the movement of many immigrants out of the slums. Finally, one might question the existence of a ”mainstream,” not to mention the possibility that many African-Americans might find its values unattractive.
Nevertheless, ”The Promised Land” is an important book, an ambitious attempt to link public policy to its constituency. Lemann`s inability to connect his ”inside the beltway” central chapter to the people whose stories dominate our attention in Clarksdale suggests the limits of his enterprise, but only at first glance.
Washington was distant. Its power brokers knew little about how poor people lived, about the difficulties of holding together a family under the pressure of economic insecurity and cultural marginalization; they knew even less about African-American history. Their successors would do well to read some of that history.
”The Promised Land” can be a first step on a journey toward an understanding of the relationship between the experience and perceptions of African-Americans, the impact of economic change on that experience and the formulation of public policy.
