In this landmark effort to understand African American people in the New World, Gunnar Myrdal provides deep insight into the contradictions of American democracy as well as a study of a people within a people. The title of the book, An American Dilemma, refers to the moral contradiction of a nation torn between allegiance to its highest ideals and awareness of the base realities of racial discrimination. The touchstone of this classic is the jarring discrepancy between the American creed of respect for the inalienable rights to freedom, justice, and opportunity for all and the...