Nicholas Lehmann

Nicholas Lemann, correspondent for Atlantic Monthly, discussed his book, "The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America." The book details the movement of blacks from the rural South to the industrial cities of the North from 1940 to 1970. Mr. Lemann discussed the origins of ... (more)the migration, which includes the mass production of the mechanical cotton picker, which freed numbers of blacks from the sharecropper system, and the development of ghettos in the industrial cities of the North. He decided to write the book on the urban migration of the blacks as a means to explain the development of ghettos, a subject he came upon while writing a newspaper feature on the welfare system. Mr. Lemann said he hoped his book would help people gain a greater insight into the development and continuation of ghettos in American cities.