tory of black migrants, the Southern economy, and politics in the northern cities. At the center of the book Lemann included a history of the federal government's responses to the urban crisis in the administrations of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. Throughout the sections on Clarksdale, Chicago and Washington Lemann connects the positive, negative or neutral effects of social policy and politics with events in the lives of his individual subjects.
Lemann begins with the demonstration of the first perfected mechanical cotton pickers in Clarksdale in 1944. Following the end of slavery and the failures of Reconstruction white planters replaced slavery with the sharecropping system in which, since they controlled the land, they were able to exploit black labor almost as completely as under the slave system. Because whites needed to rationalize their treatment of African Americans they developed a picture of black people as childish and naturally dependent and incapable of planning or participating in society as full citizens. In order to maintain the economic system that was beneficial to them whites also instituted the "Jim Crow" laws and "segregation's heyday and sharecropping's heyday substantially coincided" (14). Following the crash of cotton prices in 1920, however, the economic situation for black sharecroppers got even worse and the stories told by returning migrants from Chicago made the north seem like the "promised land" to residents of the Mississippi Delta, one of the major sharecropping regions. In Chicago, even if everything was not as wonderful as promised, black migrants were "guaranteed quadrupling of income at least" (41).
In the sharecropping era, and especially after the 1920 crash, social organization had broken down among poor African Americans. One of Lemann's main points is that sharecropping society was practically the equivalent of ghetto society today. This society was "the national center of ille...