The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How it Changed America

410 pp. "...concerns the people and lives that were transformed by the black migration. First, he tells the stories of several families who left the cotton plantations and small towns of the Mississippi Delta, heading north to the single most important destination of the great black migration, the South Side of Chicago. Following these men, women, and children over a fifty-year period, he recounts their moments of triumph and of despair, their economic successes and privation, their religion, their music, and their family lives, creating a sweeping tableau of their tough, often violent passage (still incomplete) from a caste system to the American mainstream. Lemann's second cast of characters comprises the political figures, mostly white, who formulated the official response to this huge demographic shift."