The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America

by Nicholas Lemann

Overview

A New York Times bestseller, the groundbreaking authoritative history of the migration of African-Americans from the rural South to the urban North. A definitive book on American history, The Promised Land is also essential reading for educators and policymakers at both national and local levels.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679733478
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/31/1992
Pages:	416
Sales rank:	271,198
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Nicholas Lemann was born and raised in New Orleans and has been a magazine writer since he was a teenager. He has worked at the Washington Monthly, Texas Monthly, and the Washington Post, and has been a national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly. He was the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University until 2013.

What People are Saying About This

George F. Will

Nicholas Lemann is America's best writer about America's most vexing problem. This is an instant classic of contemporary history, with the definitive account of how the nation arrived at its current dangerous situation.

Editorial Reviews

"A compelling and powerful book that should be read by anyone interested in the continuing history of racial oppression and conflict in the United States. Lemann successfully interweaves personal narratives of African-American migrants and their families with the discouraging story of politics and public policy in Chicago and Washington."— David Brion Davis, Yale University
"A fascinating and deeply moving book, a masterpiece of social anthropology. Lemann's account of the political history of the War on Poverty ranks with the very best contemporary history."—David Herbert Donald, Harvard University

From the Publisher

From 1940 to 1970, some five million blacks migrated to the urban North. In a vivid document that spent 10 weeks on PW 's bestseller list and was a BOMC, History Book Club and QPB alternate, Lemann collects personal accounts and refutes the belief that all federal programs to aid the black poor failed. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

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.

Library Journal

Richly informative…A very engaging narrative…[Lemann] has fulfilled an important and neglected need with skill and devotion, and his book deserves wide attention.
—The New York Times Book Review

C. Woodward

Brilliant…indispensable.
—The New York Review of Books

Garry Wills