An American Exodus

...Community action thus emerged as the rationale of the Administration's antipoverty program...

...Local politicians were indignant, and President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had never been enthusiastic about community action, came to dislike the War on Poverty, associating it with his liberal enemies, above all Robert Kennedy...

...At first, it was the best home she ever had...

...The market for unskilled labor went slack in the 1950s, forcing Ruby to turn to welfare...

...Poverty was deemed to be largely vestigial until 1962, when the late Michael Harrington claimed in The Other America that as much as one-third of our population, particularly in the cities, was poor...

...Community action therefore became a means of giving the urban poor cultural training to help them enter the middle class...

...Butin Chicago, at the northern end of the railroad passing through Clarksdale, World War II had augmented the demand for unskilled labor...

...Rural Southern blacks, having no alternative, nevertheless kept moving North...

...Zweigenhaft and Domhoff accept the notion that the "oppositional culture" protects blacks "against the insults and humiliations of the dominant white group" by rejecting whatever it values—including schoolwork...

...But a few decades earlier these same cities had absorbed millions of immigrants, and there was a good deal of confidence that they could do so again...

...But it soon acquired quite a different meaning, largely because of the controversy surrounding the release (in 1965) of the Moynihan report, which emphasized the need to change the culture of the urban poor...

...Three decades later, in 1970, only half of all black Americans lived below the Mason-Dixon line...

...A majority of it lived in the countryside, usually on cotton plantations "where the conditions," as Lemann says, "were much closer to slavery than to normal employment...

...Upon returning to the Robert Taylor Homes, one young man tried to talk his family into eating a proper meal "with all the silverware in the right places...

...The two of them lived with Ardell's father, a sharecropper on a plantation near the Delta town of Clarksdale...

...Both sides agreed that violent black-on-black crime was unusually common among the croppers...

...In 1963 a number of private high schools in the Northeast started a program called A Better Chance (ABC) to recruit poor, chiefly black students...

...For one thing, it was not really responsible for eroding the liberal consensus of the early 1960s...

...that would have vanished in any event, for it rested on a Democratic coalition doomed by the different interests of blacks, as opposed to ethnic Catholics, white Protestant Southerners, and Jews...

...Black families, argued Daniel Patrick Moynihan, had always been comparatively unstable in the sense that illegitimacy was widespread and a resident male often lacking...

...By the standards of the Delta, wages were miraculously high: After Ruby moved to the South Side in the '40s, she got a job in a laundry at an hourly rate that back home "had been closer to a day's pay...

...Heller was among the liberals seeking a vision to replace the New Deal...

...Proponents of community action now attributed the plight of the black community to its political impotence, but did not try to mobilize it on behalf of candidates for public office...

...Ruby never made the leap...

...In these circumstances black neighborhoods were relatively stable...

...The times were cheerful to a fault...

...In 1962 her family moved into the Robert Taylor Homes, a public-housing project...

...Black domestic life, to use the title of one of Moynihan's chapters, was a "Tangle of Pathology...

...Indeed, Ruby was to have seven children by four men, none of whom was her husband at the time, though she later married three...

...Besides, as Lemann admits, most of the War on Poverty programs were administered by conventional service agencies...

...Mechanical devices that came widely into use in the 1940s made most of them superfluous...

...The South had more than three-quarters of our black population...

...As a result, the mothers had to live apart from their men, and illegitimacy threatened to be the rule rather than the exception...

...Community action was surely a muddle, but it doesn't follow that this was terribly important...

...the failure was community action, which alienated whites without accomplishing "either the original goal of reducing juvenile delinquency or the subsequent goal of reducing poverty...

...Juanita, her daughter, dropped out of high school on becoming pregnant by a man soon convicted of murder...

...How can we know, if most are under 40...

...The middle-class blacks were also horrified at "the large degree of sexual freedom" their impoverished brethren enjoyed...

...By the 1970s, much of the country believed that it had not only failed but permanently discredited the very idea of Federal social welfare programs...

...Another experiment in acculturation is the subject of Blacks in the White Establishment?, by Richard L. Zweigenhaft and G. William Domhoff (Yale, 198 pp., $27.50...

...One reason was that it got mixed up with another idea, the "culture of poverty"—a term Oscar Lewis had invented to describe "a way of life" undermining the ability "to take full advantage of changing conditions or increased opportunities...

...Then it deteriorated into "the worst place in the country in which to raise a family...

...Instead, blacks were organized as a force against conventional politics: In Chicago, a gang called the Blackstone Rangers ran a jobs program...

...The author gets his perspective on the culture there from the Depressionera fieldwork of two Yankee academics, Hortense Powdermaker and John Dollard...

...Hundreds of them have survived in state and local governments that employ a large part of a vastly expanded black middle class...

...Rather illogically, the supporters of community action had very distinct opinions about what they wanted it to involve...

...But even though legally enforced segregation was collapsing, the United States could no longer ignore the nationalization of the race issue...

...They have come near the top, but they are blocked from the top itself...

...In fact, the slums became poorer "because many of their residents used their new government paychecks to finance their relocation to better areas...

...Fifty years ago, it was supposed to be strictly a Southern matter...

...Only unattached women, who bore 25 per cent of all black babies, could receive child support...

...Lemann argues that "black sharecropper society on theeve" of themigration "was the equivalent of big-city ghetto society today in many ways...

...The intensity of the furor generated by Moynihan's unflattering thesis made it necessary, says Lemann, to redefine community action around the assumption "that ghetto society was not in any way weak or flawed...

...The naked body of George, Ruby's first-born, washed up on the shores of Lake Michigan...

...Dollard's sources, chiefly middleclass blacks and whites, gave similar descriptions of the sharecroppers' way of life, though what the whites saw as a reflection of innate "savagery" was to blacks the product of an ongoing, centuries-old oppression...

...The military took him out of the slums and changed his culture...

...Five million people had resettled in the cities of the North...

...Still, as the loves of her life came and went she was often the head of the household—a pattern Dollard noticed in the '30s...

...But Ruby's third son, Larry, went into the Army straight from high school...

...In the North, he claimed, the mechanics of the welfare system entrenched this pattern still further within black culture...

...To my mind, Lemann is right: "What the underclass most needs is to move closer to the mainstream of American life, but assimilation is no longer the national creed...

...Initially, hardly anyone in what Lemann calls "the opinion-making classes" paid attention...

...He discovered that in Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy's Justice Department a committee on juvenile delinquency was entertaining the idea that the poor should themselves decide what they needed from government...

...Yet as Nicholas Lemann shows in The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (Knopf, 410 pp., $24.95), the problem has been transformed within our very lifetimes...

...Lemann's trail-blazing account of this 30-year metamorphosis unfolds around the remarkably interesting life of Ruby Lee Haynes, a black woman who was born in Mississippi in 1916 and eventually moved to Chicago...

...President John F. Kennedy read Harrington—or was it Dwight Macdonald's New Yorker review?—and asked Walter Heller, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, to investigate...

...At the time of Ruby's birth, her mother, Ardell, was an unmarried girl of 15...

...Although the authors hope the oppositional culture can be reconciled with education, their optimism is not persuasive...

...The landowners required a large number of sharecroppers, mostly to pick the cotton...

...The authors go on to make clear that they see no need for such a transformation, and this in effect leads them to play down the program's significance: "If 'chemistry' and 'culture' were the only barriers to blacks doing well in white society," they argue, "the star graduates of ABC should be making it to the top...

...Almost all ABC graduates went to college (mostly brand-name institutions) and now work in the professions...

...Many of them were not yet "ready to compete successfully" on this academic level, but from the outset the ABC group ranked only slightly below the median at graduation...

...Many economists thought they had found in countercyclical policy the secret of eternal prosperity...

...These results, as Zweigenhaft and Domhoff correctly remark, show that "at its fanciest and most refined, 'white culture' can readily be assimilated by lower-class blacks...

...She was sequentially monogamous rather than promiscuous, however, differing from many Wellesley and Vassar graduates largelyin her ignorance of birth control...

...Lemann nonetheless insists that the War on Poverty "did not at all end in abject failure...