From the library: The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America, by Nicholas Lemann

Last updated on: February 17, 2014 at 9:48 pm by Jane the Actuary

From the library: The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America, by Nicholas Lemann 2014-02-17T21:48:00-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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(Tuesday morning update: revised since originally posted with additional material.)

Conventional wisdom offers two explanations for the rise in illegitimacy/single parents, especially among blacks. Conservatives will tell you that this is because “Uncle Sugar” provides enough in the way of welfare benefits that men have become dispensible. Liberals will tell you that this is because of the loss of well-paying jobs that, in the past, men, and in particular black men, were able to find with no futher education than a high school diploma, or less — making men less “marriageable.”

As to the first of these, it intuitively feels right — but in order for this to be the cause of the rise in unwed parenting, there would have to be a direct correlation: an increase in the availability or generosity of welfare benefits over time; so far as I can tell, this hasn’t been the case. “Welfare” in the sense that we know it today, what was formerly known as AFDC, was started in 1935. According to Wikipedia, black women were not eligible until the 60s, but Lemann, anecdotally, describes one of the women he profiles receiving welfare in 1948.

As to the second of these explanations — this presumes that, prior to, say, the 70s or 80s, black family life was harmonious as men proudly supported their families with their work. But this is a fantasy.

Here’s the background: from the 40s to the 60s, a mass migration took place, as black sharecroppers left the South for better opportunities in the North, away from Jim Crow.

And during WWII and just thereafter, there was indeed a labor shortage in the North that meant that jobs were plentiful even for those blacks arriving fresh off the planatation, with little enough and poor enough schooling that they were just barely literate.

But at the same time, there was a “push” factor — the mechanization of cotton farming meant that sharecropping was declining during the 40s and 50s, leaving families to day labor, domestic service, and very few other options. The final nail in the coffin was quite sudden: in 1967, the minimum wage was extended to farm workers, and the last manual task in cotton farming disappeared, as herbicide use was far more economical than paying wages to workers to clear weeds.

And Lemann describes the living conditions in Chicago among the newly-arrived: yes, there were jobs, as janitors and other sorts of menial labor, which provided a living, but not the idealized single-earner family — mom worked too, and the family lived in a small apartment, perhaps even only one room for the family. Slums, gangs, violent crime — even before factories went away, life in the “ghetto” was a challenge, to say the least. And family life was not harmonious, either — both in Chicago, and in the sharecropping South, working-class black family life was marked by instability — a high illegitimacy rate, though not today’s 70%, and a high rate of break-ups even among married couples. Lemann doesn’t offer any explanations, but the instability in family life mirrors the instabiilty of sharecropping life: moving from plantation to plantation after being cheated by the owner at the “settle” when the value of the crop is tallied up against the sums borrowed by the sharecropper up until harvesttime.

In fact, among the sharecroppers, Lemann says that women were not dependent on men for their living — though it isn’t clear to me how a woman and children could bring in a crop successfully, especially if her children were too young to help with the farming and needed care themselves. Did these single moms live in extended families, with grandma or great-grandma providing the childcare? Among the sharecropping poor, and the migrated-to-the-North poor, a man may have brought in a paycheck, but he was equally likely to spend it drinking and partying, due, he says, to the hopelessness of getting ahead by virtue of hard work anyway. The explanations that single poor black mothers offer now, that having a husband is no different than having another child in terms of his irresponsibility and inability to help the family (per Promises I Can Keep, which I read through and offered some notes on, though incomplete, a while back), would seem to have held then, too.

I’d once also read that the difference between poor and middle-class blacks was, back in the day, not a matter of income but of attitude, as the middle-class attempted to live as “respectable” a life as possible, and the poor, well, didn’t. And the same appears to be true here; Lemann describes the small contingent of middle-class blacks as being embarrassed by their poor brethren.

Unfortunately, Lemann doesn’t offer enough concrete information to really understand: was there a marked change at some point, that caused blacks to abandon marriage altogether? Was that general societal shift towards “marriage is just a piece of paper” just enough to change expectations wholly in the black community? Were marriages among the poor black community sucky enough that it was no longer worth it to try? Were the incentives to marry, which counterbalanced incentives to stay single, erased? Was it, not welfare per se, but the elimination of the “man in the house” rule (struck down by the Supreme Court in 1968, according to the same Wikipedia article), which made it possible to cohabitate, but not marry, and keep welfare benefits?

Lemann, ultimately, isn’t a historian, but a journalist, and his book is more one of anecdote, tracing the fate of individuals moving Northward rather than a more comprehensive description. It’s really hard to get a full picture, especially of the economic opportunity or lack thereof in the North, and of family life among the migrants.

More frustratingly, this was the only book at the local library, and there wasn’t anything that Amazon offered that appeared to be promising enough to try to get via interlibrary loan.

And there ought to be a lot to learn about this: both in terms of understanding how poor black families came to be so troubled, and as an example of mass migration that might serve to shed some light on the long-term impacts of mass immigration from even further South (that is, Mexico), today.

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