King: A Life

by Jonathan Eig

Segregation militated against and dishonored democracy. But, at the same time, glimmers of hope appeared. Black voter registration in the South, though still heavily contested, was on the rise. In 1944, the same year King went to Connecticut, the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal published An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy. The book was the most detailed examination of American racism ever compiled by a white man, based on research performed before the United States entered World War II. Nearly 1,500 pages long, the book described what Black Americans knew but couldn’t quantify: the disparities between the races in infant mortality, employment, education, and political representation. Though Negroes made up 10 percent of the American population, Myrdal wrote, they “do not by far have anything approaching a tenth of the things worth having in America.” The Negro people, in Myrdal’s view, were being treated like aliens in their own country. This fundamental unfairness permeated every aspect of American democracy, creating a tragic gap between what it was and what it was supposed to be. Everyone knew it. The only question was how long a nation could go on failing to live up to its own moral code.