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

From the Publisher

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.

Publishers Weekly

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.)

Library Journal

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.

The New York Times Book Review - C. Woodward

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 Review of Books - Garry Wills

Brilliant…indispensable.

What People Are Saying

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.

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