Lemann’s passionately argued “Promised Land'
In 1933, the white owner of a plantation near Clarksdale, Miss., offered a favorable financial arrangement to a virtually destitute black sharecropper. In return, the owner wanted the sexual favors of the sharecropper’s teenage granddaughter, Ruby Hopkins. The sharecropper stalled for time and under cover of darkness fled the plantation with Ruby in tow. Nicholas Lemann’s “The Promised Land” (410 pages. Knopf. $24.95) focuses on Ruby Hopkins’s grim story: her efforts to attain a measure of happiness despite brutal conditions in the Mississippi delta, her decision to move to Chicago in 1946, her utter debasement by the ever-accumulating burdens and indignities that beset residents of black urban ghettos and, finally, her decision in 1979 to return to Mississippi.
Lemann uses Hopkins’s life as a prism through which to examine black slums and the underclass they spawn and entrap. The result is a richly documented chronicle that illuminates what he perceives as “the most significant remaining piece of unfinished business in our country’s long struggle to overcome its original sin of slavery.”
Between 1940 and 1970, 5 million blacks moved from the South to the North, creating, according to Lemann, “one of the largest and most rapid mass internal movements of people in history–perhaps the greatest not caused by the immediate threat of execution or starvation.” The forces which pushed blacks off Southern plantations were innovations that eliminated jobs for unskilled agricultural workers. What pulled them North were opportunities far more attractive than anything available in the Jim Crow South. In 1948, working as a janitor, Hopkins could make more money in an hour in Chicago than she could earn in a day in Clarksdale.
But up North, the migrants faced racism in the form of restrictive covenants, violence and housing policies that confined them to overcrowded neighborhoods with inferior public services. This iron ring of hostility or indifference from outside the black ghetto exacerbated corrosive features within it: undisciplined sexual habits, unstable families, drug abuse and crime. Lemann shows with searing specificity how Hopkins and her family have repeatedly been laid low by fits of self-destructiveness. Hopkins and one of her husbands lost their chance to escape the ghetto when he insisted on a new car at the expense of paying the bills for a house from which they were eventually evicted. Hopkins’s daughter mimicked her mother by having children by a variety of undependable men and (unlike her mother) developing a drug addiction. Lemann captures a horrifying pattern of misery and chaos.
“The Promised Land” is a valuable addition to the literature on the black urban underclass. Lemann never allows the reader to forget that, ultimately, white racism is the crucible within which the black ghetto was formed. And he avoids falling prey to the tendency, so prevalent now, either to blame victims for their own victimization or to view the black ghettos as perhaps an unremediable problem. Indeed, the best aspect of Lemann’s book is its realistic optimism, its recognition that even social problems as massive as those presented by black urban poverty can be addressed by the application of adequate–albeit enormous–resources. At one point he suggests an investment of $10 billion to $25 annually, but, he concludes, if it “made a significant improvement in what we all know is the principal problem in American domestic life…it would be a bargain.”
“The Promised Land” is not without flaws. Lemann’s lengthy review of presidential antipoverty policy is, for the most part, a sterile digression, inexplicably concluding with the Nixon administration. And even at its best, there is little in “The Promised Land” that is truly groundbreaking. Although it is already being hailed as a “landmark” of social analysis, it adds only modestly to a subject that has received considerable attention from academic commentators. What Lemann does and does well is popularize important knowledge that is at present all too restricted to scholarly circles. Well written and passionately argued, “The Promised Land” performs the essential task of making the predicament of the black urban poor vivid and accessible to a general audience.
