Nearly forgotten: the book behind 'Brown'.

The year 2004 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court's historic Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Commemorations were impressive and included an exhibit at the Library of Congress and numerous articles, both pro and con, analyzing Brown's enduring influence. Education authorities like Pedro Noguera lamented that white flight from the cities and subsequent court decisions had "undermined the goals of Brown," whereas African-American legal scholar Derrick Bell deemed Brown a failure in achieving its stated goal of equal education for all. Virtually no attention was paid at the time, though, to another civil-rights landmark, the 1944 study by Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy, which Commonweal's Harry Lorin Binsse called "most valuable" and "a veritable encyclopedia of information" (February 25, 1944). Whereas Brown made reference to Myrdal in a powerful but terse footnote that covered the sea of research underpinning the Court's decision, even the Library of Congress and its extensive exhibit failed to note Myrdal's monumental work.

Perhaps that silence reflects criticism of how courts had come to rely too heavily on the social sciences in determining their legal doctrine. Not only in Brown, but in a series of civil-rights decisions preceding it--dealing with public accommodations, law-school admissions, and housing--the social sciences played a prominent, decisive role. Even some liberals who fully agreed with Brown confided that, at times, it read like a sociological tract rather than a legal argument. Justice Felix Frankfurter, for one, admitted that the relatively young behavioral sciences were not yet "fully proven," but he concluded that in a fast-changing world, judicial decisions could no longer rely solely on legal precedent.

Gunnar Myrdal (1898-1987), a Swedish economist who was later (1974) awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for his theory of resource allocation, was an academic and a member of the Swedish Parliament. In 1939, he was chosen by the Carnegie Corporation to head a novel, far-reaching study of the actual lives of black Americans. The Carnegie trustees picked him because they wanted an outsider who had contacts in the U.S. academic community. Myrdal had traveled widely in the United States on a Rockefeller grant. That fact, though, did not spare his appointment criticism, from both blacks and whites. Some resented his selection out of envy, others disliked him for being a foreigner, and still others feared he might condone certain aspects of American segregation.

Myrdal turned out to defy categories and proved to be an adept organizer and publicist. He assembled a team of a dozen researchers, including Ralph Bunche, then a political scientist at Howard University, and historian E. Franklin Frazier. Eventually, more than a hundred scholars and consultants worked on the project, and the final report (which took longer to complete than anticipated because of the outbreak of World War II), ran to nearly fifteen hundred pages. And that figure does not include dozens of other research memorandums running to thousands more. Despite its length, An American Dilemma sold a hundred thousand copies and spawned several adaptations.

The "dilemma" in Myrdal's title referred to the disjunction between the idealistic rhetoric of American belief in democracy and equality of opportunity, and the reality of deep-seated racial discrimination. During Myrdal's first extensive foray into the South, he met with academics, journalists, clergymen, public officials, farmers, and factory workers, black and white. He concluded that the race problem was much worse than he had imagined. Historian David W. Southern noted that Myrdal "was overwhelmed by the intensity and depth of racial prejudice." Nearly half a century before, in 1903, W. E. B. DuBois had written that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line." Myrdal came to agree. Still, his published report hewed to an optimistic view of social reform: "The Negro problem is not only America's greatest failure," he said, "but also America's incomparably great opportunity for the future." When An American Dilemma was eventually published, DuBois was delighted. He called it monumental and unrivaled, and praised it for not avoiding the brutal facts. Ralph Ellison, on the other hand, faulted Myrdal and other liberals for underestimating the capacity of black Americans to shape their own rich and distinctive culture. Nonetheless, Ellison concluded that Myrdal's study "uses the American ethos brilliantly to disarm all American social groupings by appealing to their stake in the American Creed, and to locate the psychological barriers between them."

Predictably, racial diehards felt differently. Rock-ribbed Southern racists denounced Myrdal as a "Swedish Carpet-bagger," and Senator James Eastland introduced a Senate resolution accusing several members of Myrdal's staff of being members of subversive and Communist organizations--even though Myrdal had long been an anti-Communist. For segregationist judge Tom P. Brady in Mississippi, the Supreme Court eventually drew its misguided conclusions from Myrdal's "nonsense ... full of sound and fury signifying nothing ... based on a few uncorrelated facts, impersonally obtained." Other critics found fault with Myrdal's excessive optimism, and it now seems clear that he greatly underestimated the tenacity of racism in America and missed the tragic reality that racial equality could not be guaranteed by legal means. Still, within a decade, the "American dilemma" had become a fortuitous metaphor, not only for the Warren Court but for others who were grappling with the chasm between American ideals and practice. It provided many, in both government and private organizations, with a useful and compelling framework that offered a wealth of data and insights into the race problem.

Because of its size, scope, and source of funding, the Myrdal study was a departure from the prevailing pattern of how philanthropic foundations engaged in improving race relations. Despite being acclaimed and widely accepted, the study failed to provide the Carnegie foundation with the grant-making guidelines for which the study had been commissioned, and it was largely ignored by the foundation until the 1960s. As Waldemar Nielsen, an expert on foundations, has observed, "There have been many examples of a foundation turning its back on its failures; the Carnegie Corporation in the Myrdal study turned its back on a triumph."

And a triumph it was, even if now increasingly forgotten. In 1999, on the eve of the new millennium, An American Dilemma was chosen in the top twenty of the hundred outstanding nonfiction books of the twentieth century. Who knows where it will rank in 2044, on the occasion of its own centennial?

Richard Magat, former president of the Edward W. Hazen Foundation, is the author of Unlikely Partners: Philanthropic Foundations and the Labor Movement (Cornell University Press).