The Lasting Legacy of
An American Dilemma

The fiftieth anniversary of the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education—which said that the segregated schools of the South were damaging to black children, and thus began to dismantle the system of legalized segregation—was an occasion for assessing the last half century’s progress in the lives of African Americans. While there remains deep disagreement about the current state of black America and the policies that ought to follow from that, most would agree that the status of African Americans has changed dramatically, if insufficiently, since Brown. Not only has the system of legal segregation been eliminated and widespread prejudice diminished, but the economic, political and educational status of many blacks has significantly improved.

Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, generally viewed as one of the most important results of grantmaking by Carnegie Corporation of New York, played a major role in the story that led from an America, which after World War II still had a legal Jim Crow system in the South—along with a segregated army—to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It was cited as the social scientific evidence justifying the Supreme Court’s decision that what had been deemed separate but equal education for black children was, in fact, detrimental to their development.

Published in 1944 (by Harper & Bros.; reprinted in 1996 by Transaction Publishers), An American Dilemma served to crystallize the emerging awareness that racial discrimination and legal segregation could not endure in the U.S. Its moral wake-up call for Americans to live up to the democratic ideals of the “American Creed” became a powerful justification that united the major groups responsible for the civil rights movement. It has been called one of the most important works of social science of the twentieth century. Never before had so comprehensive and wide-ranging a study of the state of black Americans and interracial relations been carried out.

Written by: Shari Cohen, Ph.D. Cohen is president of Intersections Research, a consulting company that offers strategic planning, leadership development and political analysis. She has taught on nationalism and ethnicity and international affairs in the political science departments at the University of California, Berkeley and at Wellesley College. She has also run a research program on the future of religion and ethnicity for the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership (CLAL). Her book, Politics Without a Past: The Absence of History in Postcommunist Nationalism (Duke University Press, 1999) is about leadership and civil society in post-Communist political transitions.

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