Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
In describing the consequences of the great northward migration of black Americans from the South between 1940 and 1970, Lemann (The Fast Track, 1981; contributing editor to The Atlantic) may have written the best book on the tensions underlying American society since J. Anthony Lukas's Common Ground (1985). The migration originated in the invention of the mechanical cotton-picker, which made the sharecropper system obsolete. Trivial as this may sound, it caused, as Lemann explains, five million blacks to move north, made race a national issue, and gave the whole country ""a measure of the tragic sense that had previously been confined to the South."" Lemann shows how the migration changed the pattern of city life, disrupted education, made street crime an obsessive concern; changed voting patterns in the country as a whole, and gave birth to the idea that government programs don't work. He complements his analysis with telling accounts of those affected by the movement: Ruby Daniels, for example, a sympathetic figure though married multiple times and with a lifetime on welfare; Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley, encouraging blacks to come to Chicago to strengthen his machine, only to find them ultimately breaking it; and the politicians in Washington, fighting over what they never quite understood. Though lacking the vividness of reportage and ocean-deep research of Common Ground, this is a fine and elegant work, marked by intrepid fact-digging and insightful analysis. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Using the well-traveled route from Clarksdale, Mississippi, to Chicago, Illinois, Lemann describes the progress of blacks from the rural South to the promise of a new life in the urban North in the middle decades of the twentieth century. The author focuses on the experiences of individuals in his study, but he also expresses larger matters of more social, historical, and economic concern as he shows how the dreams of escaping from poverty and racism soon soured as hardship and prejudice reasserted themselves at the immigrants' new destination. The book's chapters on the conditions in Chicago in the post-World War II years potently illustrate the challenges these people faced as they became mired in political battles, institutional neglect, and the welfare spiral. The efforts to address--or often to confine--these problems are also analyzed as the writer describes why the war on poverty did not succeed and why the civil rights movement yielded only partial victories in trying to win improvements. While Lemann's interviews establish the human drama of this process, his assessment of the consequences of this great movement both for African Americans and for the entire country raises substantial questions of justice and equality that cut to the heart of the social situation of the impoverished and oppressed today. Notes. ~--John Brosnahan
Choice Review
Lemann has written a very human, narrative history of the African American migration to the North that covers the period from WW I to the present. Although he treats the 5 million migrants who moved after 1940, they come alive in his use of the personal history of one migrant, Ruby Lee Hopkins, and others from Clarksdale, Mississippi. Machines that picked cotton pushed this vast migration out of the South, and jobs, better pay, and the vote pulled them North. But Lemann emphasizes the effects rather than the forces of change. Blacks deserted Clarksdale, Lemann's choice as the point of departure from the Delta, for Chicago, where the promises were limited by white racism, union discrimination, the political machine, and the deline of manufacturing. Social disorganization in the form of loose sexual practices, unstable families, crime, gangs, and a crumbling ghetto followed. Efforts by the fedeal government and by community action programs could not do everything that was needed. Ruby returned to Clarksdale in time, but, although Mississippi had changed considerably for the better from the viewpoint of African Americans, social disorganization was evident there as well. Lemann argues that new, as yet unseen forces will change the ghetto and he suggests that a strong federal program could do what the Great Society had hoped to do. College, university, and public libraries. -L. H. Grothaus, Concordia Teachers College
Library Journal Review
Focusing on the larger post-1940 complement of the black South-to-North movement--the ``Great Black Migration''--that created New York's Harlem and similar black quarters in every major northern city, Lemann traces the roots of Ameri ca's rotting ghettos. Moving between Clarksdale, Mississippi, Chicago, and the nation's capital with skill, Lemann (a contributing editor at The Atlantic ) particularizes and personalizes in life stories the forces that shifted five million blacks North after 1940 and then trapped most of them and their progeny in poverty. His essay in social causation and consequences rings as a manifesto of public policy for the 1990s with the clear theme that the nation can and must undo what its racism has done. It is highly recommended for all collections on contemporary America. Quality Paperback Book Club alternate.-- Thomas J. Davis, Univ. at Buffalo, N.Y. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.