{"id":614,"date":"2014-02-17T21:48:00","date_gmt":"2014-02-17T21:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2014\/02\/from-the-library-the-promised-land-the-great-black-migration-and-how-it-changed-america-by-nicholas-lemann.html"},"modified":"2014-02-17T21:48:00","modified_gmt":"2014-02-17T21:48:00","slug":"from-the-library-the-promised-land-the-great-black-migration-and-how-it-changed-america-by-nicholas-lemann","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2014\/02\/from-the-library-the-promised-land-the-great-black-migration-and-how-it-changed-america-by-nicholas-lemann.html","title":{"rendered":"From the library: The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America, by Nicholas Lemann"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

(Tuesday morning update:\u00a0 revised since originally posted with additional material.)<\/p>\n

Conventional wisdom offers two explanations for the rise in illegitimacy\/single parents, especially among blacks. Conservatives will tell you that this is because \u201cUncle Sugar\u201d 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 \u2014 making men less \u201cmarriageable.\u201d <\/p>\n

As to the first of these, it intuitively feels right \u2014 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\u2019t been the case. \u201cWelfare\u201d in the sense that we know it today, what was formerly known as AFDC, was started in 1935. According to Wikipedia<\/a>, black women were not eligible until the 60s, but Lemann, anecdotally, describes one of the women he profiles receiving welfare in 1948. <\/p>\n

As to the second of these explanations \u2014 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. <\/p>\n

Here\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

But at the same time, there was a \u201cpush\u201d factor \u2014 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. <\/p>\n

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 \u2014 mom worked too, and the family lived in a small apartment, perhaps even only one room for the family. Slums, gangs, violent crime \u2014 even before factories went away, life in the \u201cghetto\u201d was a challenge, to say the least. And family life was not harmonious, either \u2014 both in Chicago, and in the sharecropping South, working-class black family life was marked by instability \u2014 a high illegitimacy rate, though not today\u2019s 70%, and a high rate of break-ups even among married couples. Lemann doesn\u2019t 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 \u201csettle\u201d when the value of the crop is tallied up against the sums borrowed by the sharecropper up until harvesttime. <\/p>\n

In fact, among the sharecroppers, Lemann says that women were not dependent on men for their living \u2014 though it isn\u2019t 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.\u00a0 Did these single moms live in extended families, with grandma or great-grandma providing the childcare?\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The explanations that\u00a0single 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\u00a0Can Keep, which I read through and offered some\u00a0notes on, though incomplete<\/a>, a while back), would seem to have held then, too.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

I\u2019d 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 \u201crespectable\u201d a life as possible, and the poor, well, didn\u2019t.\u00a0 And the same appears to be true here; Lemann describes the small contingent of middle-class blacks as being embarrassed by their poor brethren.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, Lemann doesn\u2019t offer enough concrete information to really understand: was there a marked change at some point, that caused blacks to abandon marriage altogether?\u00a0 Was that general societal shift towards \u201cmarriage is just a piece of paper\u201d just enough to\u00a0change expectations wholly in the black community?\u00a0 \u00a0 Were marriages among the poor black community sucky enough that it was no longer worth it to try?\u00a0 Were the incentives to marry, which counterbalanced incentives to stay single, erased?\u00a0\u00a0 Was it, not welfare per se, but the elimination of the \u201cman in the house\u201d 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?<\/p>\n

Lemann, ultimately, isn\u2019t 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\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

More frustratingly, this was the only book at the local library, and there wasn\u2019t anything that Amazon offered that appeared to be promising enough to try to get via interlibrary loan. <\/p>\n

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\u00a0long-term impacts\u00a0of mass immigration from even further South (that is, Mexico), today.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Tuesday morning update:\u00a0 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 \u201cUncle Sugar\u201d provides enough in the way of welfare benefits that men have become dispensible. Liberals will tell you that this is because […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nFrom the library: The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America, by Nicholas Lemann<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"(Tuesday morning update:  revised since originally posted with additional material.)Conventional wisdom offers two explanations for the rise in\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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