Table of Contents

IN

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.

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

"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

As cotton farming became increasingly mechanized, an estimated five million blacks migrated from the rural South to the urban North between 1940 and 1970. Lemann, Atlantic contributing editor, re-creates this vast migration in microcosm by focusing on a handful of blacks who left the Mississippi Delta for Chicago's slums. Intertwined with their personal stories are several subplots: high-level wrangling in JFK's and LBJ's war on poverty; Chicago Mayor Richard Daley applying the ?? brake to integration efforts; the raging debate over the root causes of the persistence of an underclass; the crumbling of an interracial, nonviolent civil rights movement and its replacement by the furtherance of black programs as a black cause. One of Lemann's main aims is to refute the widespread belief that all the federal government's past efforts to help the black poor failed. He sketches a framework for a wholesale assault on poverty. This compellingly dramatic, vivid document speaks to the nation's racial conscience. 40,000 first printing; BOMC, History Book Club and QPB alternates. (Mar.)