Volume 38, Number 6 · March 28, 1991
A Tale of Three Cities
By Garry Wills
The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America
by Nicholas Lemann
Knopf, 410 pp., $24.95
During the 1950s, the black population of Chicago more than doubled, fed by a stream of Southerners, many of them from the Mississippi Delta, where sharecropping as a way of life was coming to an end. As many as two thousand a week passed through the Illinois Central train station, the Ellis Island of this immigration. Many were recognized by blacks hanging around the station, waiting for the arrival of friends or relatives, ready to show them the glories of this Promised Land.
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