The Carnegie Corporation’s Gunnar Myrdal, Black Scholars of Race, and Postwar Racial Liberalism
Monday, January 5, 2015: 9:10 AM
Murray Hill Suite B (New York Hilton)
Maribel Morey, Clemson University
In the 1930s, the Carnegie Corporation commissioned the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal’s two-volume sociological study of black Americans,
An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. Soon after its publication in 1944, the book became central to national policy discussions. In 1946, U.S. President Harry Truman established a committee to investigate the status of civil rights in the country; and the following December, the Committee published
To Secure These Rights (1947). This report adopted the analytical framework and endorsed Myrdal’s conclusions particularly that segregation and discrimination were barriers that undermined black Americans’ equal rights and that the federal government had a role to play in enforcing these rights. Eight years later, the U.S. Supreme Court in
Brown v. Board of Education relied on Myrdal’s work in order to side with the NAACP’s claim that racially segregated public schools were unconstitutional. Years earlier, one of these Justices, Felix Frankfurter, had admitted that “Myrdal’s book was ‘indispensable’ for understanding the race problem.”
[1]This paper explores the Corporation’s selection of Gunnar Myrdal for its comprehensive study of black Americans, and consequently, the elite foundation’s role in defining expertise in this field of social scientific research. Moreover, it explores the relationship between this organization’s 1944 publication and the postwar federal government’s efforts to redefine its public policies with respect to black Americans. In providing an overview of this network of philanthropic managers, social scientists, and federal policymakers in the making and reception of An American Dilemma, this paper provides an opportunity to question the democratic nature of postwar racial liberalism in the United States.
[1] John Gunther, Inside U.S.A. (New York: New Press, 1947) 683, 926, cited in David W. Southern, Gunnar Myrdal and Black-White Relations: The Use and Abuse of An American Dilemma, 1944-1969 (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 129.
