The Promised Land

Nicholas Lemann tells the story of the Great Migration's second wave through Ruby Lee Daniels, a Black woman who left the cotton economy of Clarksdale, Mississippi for Chicago. He follows her and her family from Delta sharecropping into the public-housing high-rises and storefront churches of the South Side, then widens the frame to the federal anti-poverty programs, urban politics, and policy battles of the 1960s and after. The book argues that the Migration reshaped American cities and national politics alike, and that the promised land the migrants reached was built on ground far less stable than they had been led to believe.