The Promised Land Quotes

“AMERICANS ARE imbued with the notion that social systems proceed from ideas, because that is what happened at the founding of our country. The relationship of society and ideas can work the other way around, though: people can create social systems first and then invent ideas that will fulfill their need to feel that the world as it exists makes sense.”
― Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America

“The cotton gin made it possible to grow medium- and short-staple cotton commercially, which led to the spread of the cotton plantation from a small coastal area to most of the South. As cotton planting expanded, so did slavery, and slavery’s becoming the central institution of the Southern economy was the central precondition of the Civil War. What”
― Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America

“Most of the rules and customs that whites made for blacks to live by emerged from, or anyway were justified by, the whites’ ideas about blacks’ “nature.” Scrupulous financial dealings with sharecroppers were pointless, since any money the sharecroppers cleared, they would only waste. There was nothing wrong with the planters’ winking at all sorts of violations of the law by their sharecroppers, from moonshining to petty theft to polygamy to murder, because blacks had no moral life to begin with. The education of sharecroppers’ children was haphazard as a convenience to the planters, but also by design, because, in David Cohn’s words, “the Negro should be taught to work with his hands,” and real schooling “tends to unbalance him mentally.” The white ideal in the Delta was that a planter should be like a father and the sharecroppers like his children, dependent, carefree, and grateful.”
― Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America

“Sharecroppers traded at a plantation-owned commissary, often in scrip rather than money. (Martin Luther King, Jr., on a visit to an Alabama plantation in 1965, was amazed to meet sharecroppers who had never seen United States currency in their lives.)”
― Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America

“The black population of Chicago grew from 44,000 in 1910 to 109,000 in 1920, and then to 234,000 in 1930. A local commission on race relations reported that 50,000 black people had moved to Chicago from the South in eighteen months during the war. The”
― Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America

“Before the cotton crash, though, the Delta’s main problem was that black people had begun to migrate to the North to work in factories. The main transportation routes out of the Delta led straight north. The Illinois Central Railroad, which was by far the most powerful economic actor in Mississippi, had bought the Delta’s main rail system in 1892; its passengers and freight hooked up in Memphis with the main Illinois Central line, which ran from New Orleans to Chicago, paralleling the route of U.S. Highway 51. U.S. Highway 61, paralleling the Mississippi River, passed through Clarksdale; U.S. 49, running diagonally northwest through the Delta from Jackson, Mississippi, met 61 on the outskirts of Clarksdale.”
― Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America

“The leading planter families of the Delta consider themselves to be members of the Southern upper class—which is to say that they are Episcopalian, of British or Scotch-Irish extraction, and had ancestors living in the upper South before 1800—”
― Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America

“In 1940, 77 per cent of black Americans still lived in, the South—49 per cent in the rural South. The invention of the cotton picker was crucial to the great migration by blacks from the Southern countryside to the cities of the South, the West, and the North. Between 1910 and 1970, six and a half million black Americans moved from the South to the North; five million of them moved after 1940, during the time of the mechanization of cotton farming.”
― Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America

“What the mechanical cotton picker did was make obsolete the sharecropper system, which arose in the years after the Civil War as the means by which cotton planters’ need for a great deal of cheap labor was satisfied.”
― Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America