The toughest row to hoe; Nicholas Lemann takes us to the ghettos like no one else has. Now, how the hell do we get out?

• Author: Cooper, Matthew
• Position: 'The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America'

The Toughest Row to Hoe

There's no miniseries, not yet anyway. But Nicholas Lemann's new book (*) has all the trappings of a major publishing event. His account of the black migration north has been featured on the covers of both The New York Times Magazine and The New York Times Book Review. Critics as politically diverse as George Will and Garry Wills have hailed it as a "classic of contemporary history" and "indispensable."

Not surprisingly, this response delights those of us affiliated with The Washington Monthly. Lemann may make his living as a national correspondent for The Atlantic, but he's also a former editor of this magazine and among its most prolific contributors. (Conflict-of-interest check: Lemann and I are just acquaintances.) But in the flood of reviews, many of his book's strengths and even a few weaknesses have been overlooked.

On the weakness side of the equation, Lemann has left a lot unanswered about the origins of the underclass and hasn't shown us how we can really help the poor. His great unheralded strength comes from approaching his subject in so many ways--as historian, reporter, and anthropologist. By wearing many different hats, he's jarred our assumptions about well-worn topics like what life is like in the ghetto and how the war on poverty was waged. (He's certainly done that in his revisionist portrait of a familiar figure, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, beginning on page 39.)

To understand what kind of culture five million blacks brought north after 1940--a migration larger than that of the Italians or Jews--Lemann went south to Clarksdale, Mississippi, the point of departure for the families he follows. With a reporter's shoe leather and an academic's ability to grasp technical studies--including page-turners like The Collapse of Cotton Tenancy: Summary of Field Studies and Statistical Surveys 1933-35--Lemann reveals a sharecropper culture rife with drunkenness, illegitimacy, and other problems fueled by racism. White planters, for instance, would usually cheat their black tenants, who would, in turn, reasonably try to "hustle" the whites by, say, picking cotton in a slipshod manner that allowed them to earn more when their harvests were weighed. Combining reporting and history, Lemann follows this ethic north where, he argues, it got worse. He notes how E. Franklin Frazier, the black sociologist, spied this hustling--"getting over," it was called--as early as the fifties. Yet Lemann gives us the ground-level view, too, by following Ruby Haynes, whose sad story ties the book together. For Ruby, Mississippi (to which she would eventually return) and Chicago were equally ridden with crime, poverty, and bad men.

To understand why policymakers failed the migrants, Lemann excavated presidential archives and the memories of veterans of Washington's war on poverty. In doing so he disabuses us of the conservative myth that government did everything it could to help the poor. On the contrary, Washington elites, convinced that prosperity was preordained, were myopic about the black ghetto problem until the early sixties, when the migration was almost over. John Kenneth Galbraith, for one, mentioned race just once in...