Blood in the Promised Land
by
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America was out there somewhere, Roosevelt thought—a brilliant kettle of light somewhere beyond the ocean of darkness, aglow with possibilities, forever lighting the land. After all, that’s what waves of southern blacks were saying, pinning their hopes on, fleeing the South to find. That’s what most of them believed. Wanted to. Needed to. Maybe they were right, Roosevelt thought. Maybe there really was an America like that, a place people like him could journey to, somewhere north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Maybe it was in Pittsburgh, where he was headed, up there in the factories and steel mills. That’s what black folks were saying, too. You could flee the rural South, they swore, migrate to northern cities like Pittsburgh, and there it would be: a whole other world; a better, richer life. No more Jim Crow. No more Klan. No more lynchings. America the way it was supposed to be. A land of promise and hope. For all people. Even blacks. Roosevelt wondered if all that could really be true. Then again, he thought, here it was 1943, the country was at war and he was twenty-eight years old, far from a boy. Maybe he’d already found America. Maybe it was rooted, like he’d been, in Mississippi and Florida and the other places he was running from now. Maybe the South was really all there was to America and all the talk about a great northern utopia—a so-called Promised Land—was simply idle chatter. Maybe America was nothing more than an idea gone bad, a vaporous wish of the desperate and deluded. A rumor. A mirage. A myth.
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About the Book
It is 1943, and World War II rages on battlefields across the globe. But in America, another bloody, divisive battle rages as stepped-up wartime production lures legions of poor blacks from the rural South to defense jobs in the North—to a so-called “promised land” of opportunity. The wartime migration has a profound impact, transforming America’s cities into both “arsenals for democracy” and cauldrons of racial conflict.
Set against this conflicted backdrop, two men embark on separate journeys to begin a new chapter in their lives. Roosevelt Turner is a poor black migrant who flees the Jim Crow South to work in Pittsburgh’s bustling steel mills. Jacob Perlman is a Jewish physician forced to escape Nazi-occupied Europe. As each seeks to escape his harrowing past and rebuild his life in a country struggling to fulfill its own promise, their paths unwittingly cross during a violent racial conflict. In an instant, their destinies are reshaped forever.
As Roosevelt and Jacob are thrust into the crucible of the civil rights movement, they courageously join forces in an effort to crush a terrorist hate group and exorcise the ghosts from their pasts.
About the Author
Eliot Sefrin has been a newspaper and magazine reporter, editor, and publisher for more than thirty years. A native of Brooklyn, he is a graduate of the City College of New York. He currently resides near Princeton, New Jersey. This is his third novel.