THE AMERICAN DILEMMA ★^897An American Dilemma
No event reflected the new concern with the status of black Americans more
than the publication in 1944 of An American Dilemma, a sprawling account of
the country’s racial past, present, and future written by the Swedish social sci-
entist Gunnar Myrdal. The book offered an uncompromising portrait of how
deeply racism was entrenched in law, politics, economics, and social behavior.
But Myrdal combined this sobering analysis with admiration for what he called
the American Creed—belief in equality, justice, equal opportunity, and freedom.
The war, he argued, had made Americans more aware than ever of the contra-
diction between this creed and the reality of racial inequality. He concluded that
“there is bound to be a redefinition of the Negro’s status as a result of this War.”
Myrdal’s notion of a conflict between American values and American
racial policies was hardly new—Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois had
said much the same thing. But in the context of a worldwide struggle against
Nazism and rising black demands for equality at home, his book struck a chord.
It identified a serious national problem and seemed to offer an almost painless
path to peaceful change, in which the federal government would take the lead
in outlawing discrimination. This coupling of an appeal to American princi-
ples with federal social engineering established a liberal position on race rela-
tions that would survive for many years.
By 1945, support for racial justice had finally taken its place on the liberal-left
agenda alongside full employment, civil liberties, and the expansion of the
New Deal welfare state. Roosevelt himself rarely spoke out on racial issues. But
many liberals insisted that racial discrimination must be confronted head-on
through federal antilynching legislation, equal opportunity in the workplace,
an end to segregated housing and schools, and the expansion of Social Security
programs to cover agricultural and domestic workers. This wartime vision of
a racially integrated full employment economy formed a bridge between the
New Deal and the Great Society of the 1960s (see Chapter 25).
Black Internationalism
In the nineteenth century, black radicals like David Walker and Martin Delany
had sought to link the fate of African-Americans with that of peoples of African
descent in other parts of the world, especially the Caribbean and Africa. In the first
decades of the twentieth century, this kind of international consciousness was
reinvigorated. Garveyism (discussed in Chapter 19) was one example; another
was reflected in the five Pan-African Congresses that met between 1919 and 1945.
Attended by black intellectuals from the United States, the Caribbean, Europe,
and Africa, these gatherings denounced the colonial rule of Africa and sought to
establish a sense of unity among all people in the African diaspora (a term used to
How did American minorities face threats to their freedom at home
and abroad during World War II?