WHEN CHICAGO WAS HEAVEN

By Richard Zoglin

When the bus carrying O'Dell Wills from Mississippi to Chicago in 1950 neared its destination, the sharecroppers' son could hardly contain his excitement. "When we hit the city limits," he recalls, "I said, 'Wow! I'm home free. This is heaven.'" Fifteen years later, Dorothy Tillman, a civil rights worker arriving from Alabama, saw the high-rise apartment buildings where most blacks then lived and had a different reaction. "Look at all them there factories in the middle of the city," she said to her companion. "Those are not factories," he replied. "People live there."

Between 1940 and 1970, 5 million blacks moved up north from the South, a mass movement described in The Promised Land, a five-part documentary series airing next week on the Discovery Channel, as "the greatest peacetime migration in American history." It was a phenomenon that went largely undocumented at the time. Many of the migrants-and the ones focused on in this lucid, moving documentary-came from the Mississippi Delta and headed due north, to the booming city of Chicago.

Life for blacks in the South during the Depression was scarcely better than it had been during slavery. Sharecropping farmers were paid according to the amount of cotton they picked. But the totting up was done by agents of the plantation owner, and cheating was common. Most blacks could not vote, and segregation was entrenched. "Mississippi was intolerable," says one migrant. "You had to go anyplace but here."

No wonder Chicago looked like heaven. World War II had sparked an upsurge in factory jobs, and black workers from the South were suddenly in demand. Yet the influx of migrants, and the refusal of white neighborhoods to integrate, gave rise to ghettos. As the series moves into the 1960s, familiar urban dynamics start to appear: the emergence of gangs and drug-related violence, as well as the arrival of civil rights activists, who fought to integrate the city and faced opposition as fierce as anything encountered in Little Rock or Selma.

Following such estimable models as The Civil War and Eyes on the Prize, The Promised Land (produced by Anthony Geffen and based on the critically acclaimed 1991 book by Nicholas Lemann) recounts this social history with understated narration (by Morgan Freeman), evocative music (blues and gospel) and the plainspoken words of people who lived through it. They are mostly anonymous folks, free of sanctimony or self-importance. People like Uless Carter, a bespectacled, Mississippi-born minister, who reminisces with the sweet-tempered grace of a character in a John Ford western. Or James Hinton, one of 22 children of Alabama sharecroppers, who later owned a Chicago barbershop and whose gentle, unhurried gravity is something close to poetry. Like this series.