The Carnegie-Myrdal Study of the Negro in America, 1937-1941, was a comprehensive investigation of African-American life commissioned by the Carnegie Corporation of New York as a guide for the Corporation's activities as well as for "broader reasons".
The Corporation hired Gunnar Myrdal, a Swedish social scientist with the University of Stockholm and an advisor to the Swedish government, to organize and direct the project. Myrdal put together a team of social scientists of both races and sexes with the mandate of preparing memoranda on all aspects of life in the African American community. These memoranda were to serve as working documents which would assist him in the preparation of his report. The report, published in 1944, was entitled, An American Dilemma (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1944).
The social scientists who worked on the project and produced memoranda included anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists. They included M. F. Ashley-Montague, Margaret Brenman, Sterling Brown, Ralph J. Bunche, Barbara Burks, Allison Davis, Harold F. Dorn, J. G. St. Clair Drake, G. James Fleming, Lyonel C. Florant, E. Franklin Frazier, T. Arnold Hill, E. C. Isbell, Charles S. Johnson, Guion G. Johnson, Guy B. Johnson, Louise K. Kiser, Dudley Kirk, Otto Klineberg, Ruth Landes, Gunnar Lange, T. C. McCormick, Benjamin Malzberg, Paul Norgren, E. Nelson Palmer, Arthur Raper, Ira de A. Reid, Edward A. Shils, Richard Sterner, Samuel A. Stouffer, Louis Wirth, Doxey Wilkerson, and Thomas J. Woofter.
The memoranda cover a variety of topics such as religion, leisure activities, labor, family, health, leadership, organizations, migration, education, political status, mental disease, miscegenation, segregation, stereotypes, and physical characteristics. According to Myrdal, in his preface to An American Dilemma, he relied most heavily on the memoranda by Bunche ("Conceptions and Ideologies of the Negro Problem", "The Programs, Ideologies, Tactics, and Achievements of Negro Betterment and Interracial Organizations", "A Brief and Tentative Analysis of Negro Leadership", "The Political Status of the Negro"), Norgren ("Negro Labor and Its Problems"), Raper ("Race and Class Pressures"), Stouffer and Florant ("Negro Population and Negro Population Movements, 1860-1940"), Dorn ("The Health of the Negro"), Drake ("Negro Churches and Associations in Chicago"), Kirk ("The Fertility of the Negro"), and Lange ("Trends in Southern Agriculture").