Books published during the 1930s and 1940s helped the larger population understand the black experience.
These included Richard Wright’s novel Native Son (1940); Black Metropolis (1945), an important sociological study, by St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton; An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944), by the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal; and From Slavery to Freedom (1947) by the historian John Hope Franklin.
