Myrdal wrote in 1944. The statistics he struggled so wildly to discredit have not changed significantly in the past eighteen years. In this period, the Negro’s position in American society has improved phenomenally; his political power has significantly increased in most Southern cities and has become decisive in many Northern wards and congressional districts. In both North and South, Negroes sit on juries, appear as counsel, serve as police officers. Myrdal’s specious and shabby rationalizations based upon “discrimination” simply will not hold up in any national view. And of some of his fatuous explanations (that many white criminals blacken their faces to put blame on innocent Negroes, that white women are responsible for a fallaciously high Negro rape rate because they frame Negro men, that _all_ Southern Negroes are seized of an _ever-present_ hostility to law and law enforcement) the less said, the better. Yet Myrdal is so widely touted as the ablest authority on the American Negro that the Supreme Court of the United States, in the _Brown_ case, suggested that his work be “seen generally” as a support for the court’s reasoning! Well, the palpable truth is that many white men also are poor; they too know frustrations, feel resentments, fear the real world they live in. But studies of arrests by place of residence, correlated against census data on housing, suggest no levels of criminality in poor and underprivileged white neighborhoods that compare with criminality in generally comparable Negro neighborhoods. Crime always may be measured by an index of poverty, and it is true that poverty exists far more widely among Negroes than among whites; but if poverty were the whole explanation, or even a key explanation, surely the remarkable increases in Negro per capita income over the past fifty years should be reflected in some corresponding decrease in rates of crime among the Negro people. _No such correspondence exists._ The Negroes of America are better off materially, culturally, and politically than any Negroid people in the world, and their lot improves at an incredible speed. Yet there are the facts on trends in illegitimacy; and there are the facts on trends in crime. And the insistent _why?_ will not go away. Nathaniel Weyl, who started his studies with an environmentalist’s view, concludes his chapter on Negro criminality with a comment that the character patterns disclosed by the facts are “presumably genetic in origin.” Dr. W. C. George, head of the Department of Anatomy at the University of North Carolina, also tends to find an explanation in racial factors: “Whatever other virtues Negroes may have, and they have many, all of the evidence that I know about--and there is a lot of it--indicates that the Caucasian race is superior to the Negro race in the creation and maintenance of what we call civilization.”