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A Nobel Peace Prize winner's groundbreaking work of social science that offered one of the earliest portraits of Black life in twentieth-century America
 
This volume presents the essence of a massive report prepared in 1940 by a team headed by political scientist and civil rights leader Ralph J. Bunche for the Carnegie Corporation’s Survey of the Negro in America. The report was used by Swedish social economist Gunnar Myrdal in writing his monumental An American Dilemma, and it shaped Myrdal’s treatment of the Black political experience. As a valuable historical document, it provides a backdrop against which we can measure change in the Black American’s political status and interpret the origins and consequences of the second Reconstruction.
 
The Political Status of the Negro introduces essential information about political practices in the Southern states. It offers insight into the historical, economic, sociological, and psychological factors that accounted for these practices, as well as some understanding of the myths, stereotypes, and symbols that contemporaries often used to explain and justify them. The study’s most enduring value lies in its wealth of personal interviews which were conducted in the South in the late 1930s and in its first-hand impressions of the African Americans and Southern politics.
 
The book is divided into two parts: The first contains Bunche’s explanations, comments, and analytical writings on the subject; the second includes almost all of the interviews and field reports. To this text historian Dewey W. Grantham added a comprehensive introduction that discusses Bunche and his work, the preparation of the research manuscript, and the book’s role in Gunnar Myrdal’s later work.