Gunnar Myrdal: An American Dilemma

Although Gunnar Myrdal is not an American he, like Tocqueville, offered much insight into American culture and society. Myrdal wrote about race relations in the United States. In his "An American Dilemma," Myrdal writes of the North's disillusionment with the South's treatment of African Americans.
Myrdal writes, "The Northerner does not have his social conscience and all his political thinking permeated with the Negro problem as the Southerner does. Rather, he succeeds in forgetting about it most of the time. The Northern newspapers help him by minimizing all Negro news, except crime news. The Northerners want to hear as little as possible...The result is an astonishing ignorance about the Negro on the part of the white public in the North." Myrdal argues that the North and the federal government were completely ignorant towards the racism and the Jim Crow aspect of the South.
It was Myrdal's writing on segregation and the potential causes and methods of a future civil rights movement that influenced many journalists, judges, and lawyers to pursue race equality. Myrdal's book helped the Supreme Court find factual information for their reason for overturning Plessy vs. Fergusion.
It was Myrdal's writing that influenced the Supreme Court to integrate, Civil Rights leaders to demonstrate, and journalists to report on more than just African American crime. Myrdal heavily influenced the Civil Rights Movement and was the foundation of many American intellectuals.

Here is a link to some passages from Myrdal's book, "An American Dilemma."

http://books.google.com/books?id=VH0SFTzWdokC&dq=Gunnar+Myrdal&printsec=frontcover&source=an&hl=en&ei=8sT3SdnyE8OLtgezovjBDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4#PPP1,M1