The persistence of racial inequality in a democratic society may be the gravest problem confronting the United States. It has surely been the most intractable. Yet the torrent of scholarship and comment unleashed in recent years by the question of race provides a general reader with little overall understanding of the solutions attempted and the resulting outcomes. These essays by ten leading scholars offer the most compact comprehensive appraisal we have of how the modern civil rights movement arose, what changes it brought about in relationships between blacks and whites, and how it led to affirmative action, to multiculturalism, and eventually to the present stalemate and discontent.

Contributors are Christopher Beem, Lawrence Bobo, Erwin Chemerinsky, Gerald Early, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Lawrence H. Fuchs, Nathan Glazer, John Higham, Douglas S. Massey, and Diane Ravitch.