Beginning in the 1930s, carefully selected samples of Americans were asked their opinions on a remarkably wide range of subjects, such as capital punishment, foreign affairs, and the minimum wage. But race was not among the issues posed. Indeed, in Cantril’s (1951) massive compendium of survey results from 1935 to 1946, only a single question can be found that refers directly to black Americans (an item prompted by Eleanor Roosevelt’s resignation from the Daughters of the American Revolution when it denied the use of its concert hall to Marian Anderson). Struck by the virtual absence of racial questions from the early surveys, Paul Sheatsley noted, “The polls, for obvious reasons, tend to ask their questions about the issues that are hot, and it is clear that, during the decade preceding World War II, race relations did not qualify on that basis…Negroes had their place, and it was a rare American white who became exercised over this fact of life” (1966, 217). All this was soon to change. Black Americans began to organize and press their demands for equal rights; segregation and discrimination moved onto the nation’s agenda; and survey research responded accordingly. Our purpose in this chapter is to recount the various ways that race became and remains a major focus for survey research across the social sciences. We will see that what might be termed Sheatsley’s “thermodynamic” thesis about how public events and survey content are linked has considerable–though not complete–validity for surveys of racial attitudes over the rest of the twentieth century. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved) (from the chapter)