That year saw President Harry Truman issue executive orders which prohibited discrimination in civilian agencies and which segregated the nation's armed forces - the nation's first significant federal civil rights actions since the years after the Civil War. The first recorded mention of race in response to Gallup's most important problem question came in 1948 when 9% of Americans named it as the top problem. 9% of Americans cited this issue in Gallups June 1948 reading compared with 19% who said so in Gallup latest reading. The percentages of Americans who cited race or racism as the most important problem facing the United States. This is, by one point, the highest percentage since July 1968 and is the latest example of periodic points in time when mentions of race as the most important problem reach double digits. Some 19% of Americans named race relations as the nation's top problem in our May 28-June 4 survey. The current situation is one of these times. But race moves to a more manifest or front and center position when external events function as prompts or reminders. It is consistently present in the background of Americans' thinking and has become a little more likely to be mentioned by Americans in recent years on a consistent basis. Since 1939, I can best characterize the results of our most important problem trend question as a series of spikes - periods of time when race moved into the forefront of Americans' consciousness, inevitably followed by longer periods of time when race is much less frequently mentioned as the nation's top problem.Īs such, I think race can be defined as a latent concern for Americans. Had there been, race would no doubt have been a dominant response to the most important problem question at many points over the tumultuous centuries since the nation's founding, both leading up to and following the Civil War and the Jim Crow years that followed. Of course, we didn't have systematic survey research in the years prior to the 1930s. The consistency with which the question has been asked over the past 80 years gives us a solid indicator of the historical ebb and flow of race and race-related issues in the average American's mind. The question provides a unique gauge of the salience of the many, many potential concerns that face the country at any given point in time. Gallup has been asking this question since 1939 - every month since 2001 and throughout the decades prior to that on a less regular basis. The question asks Americans to name, off the top of their head, the most important problem facing the nation. Gallup's long-standing "most important problem" question provides important context for measuring the impact of the May 25 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
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