Suchergebnisse

This, the fiftieth annual meeting of our Association, has more than ordinary significance. Certainly it can be said that the Association has attained middle-age and the intellectual as well as the physical maturity to do proper credit to our years. We may, on this special occasion at least, regard with pardonable pride our record of growth, the recognition and development of our discipline in both teaching and research, the public service it has rendered, and its contribution to the forward progress of American political democracy. American political scientists, practitioners of what Aristotle rightly or wrongly described as the "master science," have recognized, as did Plato and Aristotle, the surpassing importance of political problems in society and have experienced the difficulties which they foresaw in the effort to employ scientific methods and procedures in the solution of such problems. Beyond doubt, however, we move steadily forward. Our scientific and professional standards show constant improvement. Our store of knowledge is immense. Our almost feverish search for new data is incessant. We know almost all there is to know about the political infirmities of our patients except how to cure them. The state of domestic and world affairs keeps us humble.

A world-renowned scholar and statesman, Dr. Ralph J. Bunche (1903—1971) began his career as an educator and a political scientist, and later joined the United Nations, serving as Undersecretary General for seventeen of his twenty-five years with that body. This African American mediator was the first person of color anywhere in the world to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. In the mid-1930s, Bunche played a key role in organizing the National Negro Congress, a popular front-styled group dedicated to progressive politics and labor and civil rights reform. A Brief and Tentative Analysis of Negro Leadership provides key insight into black leadership at the dawn of the modern civil rights movement. Originally prepared for the Carnegie Foundation study, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, Bunche's research on the topic was completed in 1940. This never-before-published work now includes an extended scholarly introduction as well as contextual comments throughout by Jonathan Scott Holloway.Despite the fact that Malcolm X called Bunche a "black man who didn't know his history," Bunche never wavered from his faith that integrationist politics paved the way for racial progress. This new volume forces a reconsideration of Bunche's legacy as a reformer and the historical meaning of his early involvement in the civil rights movement