Ralph Bunche's Ill-Fated Book on the Political Status of the Negro in the South

• In Event: Past as Prologue: Anchoring Race, Ethnicity and Politics to the Howard School

Abstract

This paper excavates Ralph Bunche’s unfinished 1943 manuscript on The Political Status of the Negro in the South to explore its contributions to understanding racial politics in the US South, and to explicate the manuscript’s erasure and problematic publication in different forms. The book’s only published version, The Political Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR, edited with an introduction by Dewey Grantham, appeared in 1973, two years after Bunche’s death, and is a very different text. The working title of Bunche’s manuscript made no mention of FDR, but instead referenced the political corruption of white Southern politicians and the political marginalization of poor whites.

Revisiting Charles Henry’s introduction of the notion of a Howard School of race relations (2004) establishes that Bunche developed the conceptual foundation for his study of Southern politics in A World View of Race (1936). But he pulled the data that revealed the complex racial politics of black-white relations from more than 600 interviews collected in his work as a senior researcher with the Carnegie Corporation’s Project on the Negro. To keep the focus of the project on the Negro, Carnegie’s president Fredrick Keppel ordered all of Bunche’s research materials turned over to the Schomburg as a repository, where they were embargoed. Meanwhile, Gunnar Myrdal had full access to Bunche’s material, which he admittedly “cannibalized” to write An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944). It is noteworthy that Bunche frames his discussion of “The Negro Problem” in the language of human rights.

Author

• Pearl T. Robinson, Tufts University