ABSTRACT
Few issues of the past four decades have so absorbed the energies and efforts of the American people as the “problem of the color line.” Forty years have passed since the publication of Gunnar Myrdal’s American Dilemma, the epochal study of the American race problem by the internationally respected Swedish social scientist. Thirty years have passed since the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down racial segregation in the nation’s schools, and sounded the death knell for legal segregation throughout society. And twenty years have passed since the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which erected a broad policy framework for the federal government’s protection of the basic rights of blacks and other victims of discrimination.
