Word: lemann
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...those at the top have been burdened and forced down, those at the bottom have been raised a bit. Uless Carter, 75, one of the people in The Promised Land, Nicholas Lemann's chronicle of the black migration, is back in Clarksdale, living in a retirement community. He spent 38 years in Chicago, an additional six in Flint, Mich. The stories of change lured him home. "There are black people working in the banks and stores now," he says. "They treat you now like a human being. It is wonderful. My prayers have been answered." So little asked, so little...
...PROMISED LAND by Nicholas Lemann (Knopf; $24.95). The second great migration that shaped the U.S.: the movement of millions of blacks from the rural South to the cities of the North...
...Lemann deals directly with the messy question of whether the sharecropper culture the migrants left behind helped lead them into the trap of ghetto poverty. He sides with those who believe that a high number of unwed mothers, female-headed households and short-lived marriages were characteristics of sharecropper life that were reproduced in the Northern slums. But he stops short of the conclusion that often follows: broken families or a "culture of ^ poverty" created the disaster of the ghettos. He puts the blame instead on the disappearance of unskilled manufacturing jobs, a problem misguided federal policies did little...
...book's sharpest commentary is reserved for Washington. In the city Lemann describes, the real corridors of power are the margins of agency memos, where bureaucrats fight a war of ideas in scribbled asides. The Promised Land is indispensable for understanding how the War on Poverty advanced along the wrong front, favoring panaceas like community action and higher welfare payments while devoting too little attention to job creation. In the end, Lemann insists, the federal effort had its greatest impact by employing ghetto blacks in antipoverty agencies. For many that government paycheck was their ticket out of the ghetto...
...Lemann concludes by arguing against the conservative truism that federal antipoverty programs are doomed to failure -- and by wondering how long it will be before the national will to defeat poverty can be summoned again. "In American life," he writes, "the underclass is stuck in the antechamber where policy issues rest until they become political crusades." Perhaps someday the great trek northward will at least have a monument like the one that stands at Ellis Island to commemorate the first great migration. Meanwhile, The Promised Land is an important cornerstone in the effort to understand why so many travelers...