Carnegie
Corporation
of New York
Fall 2004
The main players were the Rockefeller Foundation, through support of the General Education Board (GEB) and the Laura Spellman Rockefeller Memorial Fund; the Julius Rosenwald Fund and the Phelps Stokes Fund. Of these, GEB worked on the premise that educating whites in the South was the primary way to help blacks. Their work focused on universal education, though they accepted separate and inferior schools for blacks. The Laura Spellman Rockefeller Memorial and Rosenwald funds supported both black and white scholars in social scientific and cultural studies of black Americans. They were increasingly moving into supporting black health and economic welfare. Rosenwald was the most progressive, and was responsible for establishing the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, which brought together leading white and black citizens in communities across the South to work on common problems (Nielsen, The Big Foundations, p. 340). Carnegie was less involved than were these other foundations and its grants had been mostly for black colleges in the South. But it had also contributed to organizations such as the Commission on Interracial Cooperation and the Urban League.
While Keppel remained a product of the times in his own attitudes, he did understand that there needed to be a breakthrough in the constraints and interests that surrounded the issue of race in the American scholarly community. He came to believe that race was such an emotional and fraught issue that neither a northerner, nor a southerner, neither a black nor a white scholar, would be able to achieve a sufficiently objective study and one that would get a fair hearing once it was done.
In opting to look for a foreigner to do the study, Keppel consciously overlooked another project that was being considered for funding at the time—the Encyclopedia of the Negro. The ambitious project, with W.E.B. DuBois as editor, was to be supervised by a board of leading black and white scholars and reformers. DuBois had hoped to use the project to “reformulate the problem of the century” (Lewis, W.E.B. DuBois, p. 446). It did not however, meet Keppel’s criteria of objectivity given DuBois’ two decades of civil rights advocacy in the NAACP. Carnegie Corporation staff involved in the encyclopedia were also concerned about discord among the black and white collaborators.
Keppel’s choice of using a foreign scholar and one who was not an expert in the field was also viewed skeptically by some of the other established scholars of black life in America and interracial relations of the time, who did not believe that a non-American would be able to say anything new about the subject.
After a search through a list that included twenty-five names, Keppel chose Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish economist, then thirty-nine years old. In the invitation to Myrdal, Keppel wrote that Carnegie Corporation wanted “someone who would approach the situation with an entirely fresh mind. We have also thought that it would be wise to seek a man in a non-imperialistic country with no background of domination of one race over another” (Jackson, p. 33).
Myrdal, who would go on to win the 1974 Nobel Prize in Economic Science (which he shared with Friedrich von Hayek) arrived in New York to begin the work in September 1938.