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...PROMISED LAND by Nicholas Lemann...
Author Nicholas Lemann in The Promised Land -- his best-selling study of black migration from the South -- demonstrates that "community action" became a linchpin of the 1960s War on Poverty, even though few policymakers understood its mischievous implications. Lemann quotes a key Johnson Administration official as saying that community action (mobilizing the poor to pressure the local political establishment) "might lead somewhere, but we didn't know where." What makes this historical point relevant and disconcerting is that the same can be said about current White House support for unrestricted Choice: no one knows what it will produce...
...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 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...