''The Negro Family: The Case For National Action'', commonly known as the Moynihan Report, was a 1965 report on
black poverty in the
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...
written by
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Daniel Patrick Moynihan (March 16, 1927 – March 26, 2003) was an American politician, diplomat and sociologist. A member of the Democratic Party, he represented New York in the United States Senate from 1977 until 2001 and served as an ...
, an American scholar serving as Assistant Secretary of Labor under President
Lyndon B. Johnson
Lyndon Baines Johnson (; August 27, 1908January 22, 1973), often referred to by his initials LBJ, was an American politician who served as the 36th president of the United States from 1963 to 1969. He had previously served as the 37th vice ...
and later to become a US Senator. Moynihan argued that the rise in
black single-mother families was caused not by a lack of jobs, but by a destructive vein in
ghetto culture, which could be traced to slavery times and continued discrimination in the
American South
The Southern United States (sometimes Dixie, also referred to as the Southern States, the American South, the Southland, or simply the South) is a geographic and cultural region of the United States of America. It is between the Atlantic Ocean ...
under
Jim Crow
The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws enforcing racial segregation in the Southern United States. Other areas of the United States were affected by formal and informal policies of segregation as well, but many states outside the Sout ...
.
Black sociologist
E. Franklin Frazier
Edward Franklin Frazier (; September 24, 1894 – May 17, 1962), was an American sociologist and author, publishing as E. Franklin Frazier. His 1932 Ph.D. dissertation was published as a book titled ''The Negro Family in the United States'' (1 ...
had introduced that idea in the 1930s, but Moynihan was considered one of the first academics to defy conventional social-science wisdom about the structure of poverty. As he wrote later, "The work began in the most orthodox setting, the
US Department of Labor
The United States Department of Labor (DOL) is one of the executive departments of the U.S. federal government. It is responsible for the administration of federal laws governing occupational safety and health, wage and hour standards, unemploym ...
, to establish at some level of statistical conciseness what 'everyone knew': that economic conditions determine social conditions. Whereupon, it turned out that what everyone knew was evidently not so." The report concluded that the high rate of families headed by single mothers would greatly hinder progress of blacks toward economic and political equality. The Moynihan Report was criticized by liberals at the time of publication, and its conclusions remain controversial.
Background
While writing ''The Negro Family: The Case For National Action,'' Moynihan was employed in a political appointee position at the US Department of Labor, hired to help develop policy for the Johnson administration in its
War on Poverty
The war on poverty is the unofficial name for legislation first introduced by United States President Lyndon B. Johnson during his State of the Union address on January 8, 1964. This legislation was proposed by Johnson in response to a national p ...
. In the course of analyzing statistics related to black poverty, Moynihan noticed something unusual: Rates of black
male unemployment
Unemployment, according to the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), is people above a specified age (usually 15) not being in paid employment or self-employment but currently available for work during the refere ...
and welfare enrollment, instead of running parallel as they always had, started to diverge in 1962 in a way that would come to be called "Moynihan's scissors."
[Kay S. Hymowitz, "The Black Family: 40 Years of Lies"](_blank)
''City Journal
''City Journal'' is a public policy magazine and website, published by the conservative Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, that covers a range of topics on urban affairs, such as policing, education, housing, and other issues. The magazine ...
''
When Moynihan published his report in 1965, the out-of-wedlock birthrate among blacks was 25 percent, much higher than that of whites.
Contents
In the introduction to his report, Moynihan said that "the gap between the Negro and most other groups in American society is widening."
He also said that the collapse of the nuclear family in the black lower class would preserve the gap between possibilities for Negroes and other groups and favor other ethnic groups. He acknowledged the continued existence of racism and discrimination within society, despite the victories that blacks had won by civil rights legislation.
Moynihan concluded, "The
steady expansion of welfare programs can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States."
More than 30 years later,
S. Craig Watkins described Moynihan's conclusions: ''Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema'' (1998):
The report concluded that the structure of family life in the black community constituted a 'tangle of pathology... capable of perpetuating itself without assistance from the white world,' and that 'at the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family. It is the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community at the present time.' Also, the report argued that the matriarchal structure of black culture weakened the ability of black men to function as authority figures. That particular notion of black familial life has become a widespread, if not dominant, paradigm for comprehending the social and economic disintegration of late 20th-century black urban life.[S. Craig Watkins, ''Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema,'', pp. 218–219]
Influence
The Moynihan Report generated considerable controversy and has had long-lasting and important influence. Writing to
Lyndon Johnson
Lyndon Baines Johnson (; August 27, 1908January 22, 1973), often referred to by his initials LBJ, was an American politician who served as the 36th president of the United States from 1963 to 1969. He had previously served as the 37th vice ...
, Moynihan argued that without access to jobs and the means to contribute meaningful support to a family, black men would become systematically alienated from their roles as husbands and fathers, which would cause rates of divorce, child abandonment and out-of-wedlock births to skyrocket in the black community (a trend that had already begun by the mid-1960s), leading to vast increases in the numbers of households headed by females.
Moynihan made a contemporaneous argument for programs for jobs, vocational training, and educational programs for the black community. Modern scholars of the 21st century, including
Douglas Massey
Douglas Steven Massey (born October 5, 1952 in Olympia, Washington, United States) is an American sociologist. Massey is currently a professor of Sociology at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and i ...
, believe that the report was one of the more influential in the construction of the
War on Poverty
The war on poverty is the unofficial name for legislation first introduced by United States President Lyndon B. Johnson during his State of the Union address on January 8, 1964. This legislation was proposed by Johnson in response to a national p ...
.
In 2009 historian
Sam Tanenhaus
Sam Tanenhaus (born October 31, 1955) is an American historian, biographer, and journalist. He currently is a writer for '' Prospect''.
Early years
Tanenhaus received his B.A. in English from Grinnell College in 1977 and a M.A. in English Liter ...
wrote that Moynihan's fights with the
New Left
The New Left was a broad political movement mainly in the 1960s and 1970s consisting of activists in the Western world who campaigned for a broad range of social issues such as civil and political rights, environmentalism, feminism, gay rights, g ...
over the report were a signal that
Great Society
The Great Society was a set of domestic programs in the United States launched by Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964–65. The term was first coined during a 1964 commencement address by President Lyndon B. Johnson at the University ...
liberalism had political challengers both from the right and from the left.
Reception and following debate
From the time of its publication, the report has been sharply attacked by black and civil rights leaders as examples of white patronizing, cultural bias, or racism. At various times, the report has been condemned or dismissed by the
NAACP
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is a civil rights organization in the United States, formed in 1909 as an interracial endeavor to advance justice for African Americans by a group including W. E.&nb ...
and other civil rights groups and leaders such as
Jesse Jackson
Jesse Louis Jackson (né Burns; born October 8, 1941) is an American political activist, Baptist minister, and politician. He was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988 and served as a shadow U.S. senator ...
and
Al Sharpton
Alfred Charles Sharpton Jr. (born October 3, 1954) is an American civil rights activist, Baptist minister, talk show host and politician. Sharpton is the founder of the National Action Network. In 2004, he was a candidate for the Democratic ...
. Critics accused Moynihan of relying on stereotypes of the black family and black men, implying that blacks had inferior academic performance, portrayed crime and pathology as endemic to the black community and failing to recognize that cultural bias and racism in standardized tests had contributed to apparent lower achievement by blacks in school. The report was criticized for threatening to undermine the place of civil rights on the national agenda, leaving "a vacuum that could be filled with a politics that blamed Blacks for their own troubles."
In 1987,
Hortense Spillers
Hortense J. Spillers (born 1942) is an American literary critic, Black Feminist scholar and the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor at Vanderbilt University. A scholar of the African diaspora, Spillers is known for her essays on African-American ...
, a black feminist academic, criticized the Moynihan Report on semantic grounds for its use of "matriarchy" and "patriarchy" when he described the African-American family. She argues that the terminology used to define white families cannot be used to define African-American families because of the way slavery has affected the African-American family.
Scholar
Roderick Ferguson Roderick Ferguson is Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and American Studies at Yale University. He was previously professor of African American and Gender and Women's Studies in the African American Studies Department at the Univer ...
traced the effects of the Moynihan Report in his book ''Aberrations in Black,'' noting that black nationalists disagreed with the report’s suggestion that the state provide black men with masculinity, but agreed that men needed to take back the role of the patriarch. Ferguson argued that the Moynihan Report generated hegemonic discourses about minority communities and nationalist sentiments in the Black community. Ferguson uses the discourse of the Moynihan Report to inform his
Queer of Color Critique #REDIRECT Queer of color critique
{{Rcatshell, {{R from move{{R from alternative capitalisation ...
, which attempts to resist national discourse while acknowledging a simultaneity of oppression through coalition building.
African-American
libertarian
Libertarianism (from french: libertaire, "libertarian"; from la, libertas, "freedom") is a political philosophy that upholds liberty as a core value. Libertarians seek to maximize autonomy and political freedom, and minimize the state's e ...
economist and writer
Walter E. Williams
Walter Edward Williams (March 31, 1936December 1, 2020) was an American economist, commentator, and academic. Williams was the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University, as well as a syndicated columnist ...
has praised the report for its findings. He has also said, "The solutions to the major problems that confront many black people won't be found in the political arena, especially not in Washington or state capitols."
[ ]Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowell (; born June 30, 1930) is an American author, economist, political commentator and academic who is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. With widely published commentary and books—and as a guest on TV and radio—he becam ...
, an African-American libertarian economist as well, has also praised the Moynihan Report on several occasions. His 1982 book ''Race and Economics'' mentions Moynihan's report, and in 1998 he asserted that the report "may have been the last honest government report on race." In 2015 Sowell argued that time had proved correct Moynihan's core idea that African-American poverty was less a result of racism and more a result of single-parent families: "One key fact that keeps getting ignored is that the poverty rate among black married couples has been in single digits every year since 1994."
Political commentator Heather Mac Donald
Heather Lynn Mac Donald (born November 23, 1956) is an American conservative political commentator, essayist, attorney, and author.Charles C. W. Cooke, February 26, 2014, National ReviewYes, Atheism and Conservatism are Possible: You needn’t be ...
wrote for ''National Review
''National Review'' is an American conservative editorial magazine, focusing on news and commentary pieces on political, social, and cultural affairs. The magazine was founded by the author William F. Buckley Jr. in 1955. Its editor-in-chief i ...
'' in 2008, "Conservatives of all stripes routinely praise Daniel Patrick Moynihan's prescience for warning in 1965 that the breakdown of the black family threatened the achievement of racial equality. They rightly blast those liberals who denounced Moynihan's report."
Sociologist Stephen Steinberg argued in 2011 that the Moynihan report was condemned "because it threatened to derail the Black liberation movement."[Stephen Steinberg, "Poor Reason - Culture still doesn’t explain poverty"]
''Boston Review
''Boston Review'' is an American quarterly political and literary magazine. It publishes political, social, and historical analysis, literary and cultural criticism, book reviews, fiction, and poetry, both online and in print. Its signature form ...
'', January 13, 2011.
Attempting to divert responsibility
Psychologist William Ryan coined the phrase "blaming the victim
Victim blaming occurs when the victim of a crime or any wrongful act is held entirely or partially at fault for the harm that befell them. There is historical and current prejudice against the victims of domestic violence and sex crimes, such as t ...
" in his 1971 book ''Blaming the Victim'', specifically as a critique of the Moynihan report. He said that it was an attempt to divert responsibility for poverty from social structural factors to the behaviors and cultural patterns of the poor.
Feminist critique
Feminists argue the Moynihan Report presents a "male-centric" view of social problems. They believe that Moynihan failed to take into account basic rational incentives for marriage. He did not acknowledge that women had historically engaged in marriage in part out of need for material resources, as adequate wages were otherwise denied by cultural traditions excluding women from most jobs outside the home. With the expansion of welfare in the US in the mid to late 20th century, women gained better access to government resources intended to reduce family and child poverty. Women also increasingly gained access to the workplace. As a result, more women were able to subsist independently when men had difficulty finding work.
Counter-response
Declaring Moynihan "prophetic," Ken Auletta
Kenneth B. Auletta (born April 23, 1942) is an American author, a political columnist for the New York Daily News, and media critic for ''The New Yorker''.
Early life and education
The son of an Italian American father and a Jewish American ...
, in his 1982 ''The Underclass'', proclaimed that "one cannot talk about poverty in America, or about the underclass, without talking about the weakening family structure of the poor." Both the ''Baltimore Sun
''The Baltimore Sun'' is the largest general-circulation daily newspaper based in the U.S. state of Maryland and provides coverage of local and regional news, events, issues, people, and industries.
Founded in 1837, it is currently owned by Tr ...
'' and the ''New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...
'' ran a series on the black family in 1983, followed by a 1985 ''Newsweek'' article called "Moynihan: I Told You So." In 1986, CBS aired the documentary ''The Vanishing Family
''The Vanishing Family: Crisis in Black America'' is a CBS News CBS Reports, special report hosted by Bill Moyers that aired in January 1986. It explores changes in African-American family structure at a time when 60% of Black children were born t ...
'', hosted by Bill Moyers
Bill Moyers (born Billy Don Moyers, June 5, 1934) is an American journalist and political commentator. Under the Johnson administration he served from 1965 to 1967 as the eleventh White House Press Secretary. He was a director of the Counci ...
, a onetime aide to President Johnson, which affirmed Moynihan's findings.
In a 2001 interview with PBS
The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is an American public broadcasting, public broadcaster and Non-commercial activity, non-commercial, Terrestrial television, free-to-air television network based in Arlington, Virginia. PBS is a publicly fu ...
, Moynihan said:
My view is we had stumbled onto a major social change in the circumstances of post-modern society. It was not long ago in this past century that an anthropologist working in London – a very famous man at the time, Malinowski
Malinowski (Polish pronunciation: ; feminine: Malinowska; plural: Malinowscy) is a surname of Polish-language origin. It is related to the following surnames:
People
* Agnieszka Malinowska, Polish mathematician
* (born 1954), Polish Army gene ...
– postulated what he called the first rule of anthropology: That in all known societies, all male children have an acknowledged male parent. That's what we found out everywhere.... And well, maybe it's not true anymore. Human societies change."Daniel Patrick Moynihan Interview".
PBS.
By the time of that interview, rates of the number of children born to single mothers had gone up in the white and Hispanic working classes as well. In November 2016, the
Current Population Survey
The Current Population Survey (CPS) is a monthly survey of about 60,000 U.S. households conducted by the United States Census Bureau for the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The BLS uses the data to publish reports early each month called the Emp ...
of the
United States Census Bureau
The United States Census Bureau (USCB), officially the Bureau of the Census, is a principal agency of the U.S. Federal Statistical System, responsible for producing data about the American people and economy. The Census Bureau is part of the ...
reported that 69 percent of children under the age of 18 lived with two parents, which was a decline from 88 percent in 1960, while the percentage of U.S. children under 18 living with one parent increased from 9 percent (8 percent with mothers, 1 percent with fathers) to 27 percent (23 percent with mothers, 4 percent with fathers).
See also
*
African-American family structure
The family structure of African Americans has long been a matter of national public policy interest. A 1965 report by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, known as ''The Moynihan Report'', examined the link between black poverty and family structure. It hyp ...
*
Black matriarchy
Black matriarchy is a term for the black American families mostly led by women.
First usage
The issue was first brought to national attention in 1965 by sociologist and later Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in the Moynihan Report (al ...
*
Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study
* ''
Is Marriage for White People?''
*
William Julius Wilson
William Julius Wilson (born December 20, 1935) is an American sociologist. He is a professor at Harvard University and author of works on urban sociology, race and class issues. Laureate of the National Medal of Science, he served as the 80th P ...
References
Further reading
* Aksamit, Daniel. "How the pathology became tangled: Daniel Patrick Moynihan and the liberal explanation of poverty since the 1960s." ''PS: Political Science & Politics'' 50.2 (2017): 374-378.
* Averbeck, Robin Marie. (2015
"The Good Old Liberals,"''Jacobin Magazine,'' recounts critiques of the Moynihan Report by Civil Rights leaders and provides a Left response to recurring 'nostalgia' for Moynihan in the press.
*Ferguson, Roderick A. (2004) ''
Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique'' University of Minnesota Press. In chapter 4, Ferguson analyzes the Moynihan Report as a coalition of sociological canons, black nationalism, the civil rights movement, neoconservative resentment, and neo-racist tendencies to initiate a trend that sought to reaffirm heteropatriarchal normativity
* Hymowitz, Kay S. (Summer 2005)
The Black Family: 40 Years of Lies"" ''City Journal,'' argues that early rejection of the Moynihan Report caused untold, needless misery in inner city communities.
* Geary, Daniel. "Racial Liberalism, the Moynihan Report, and the Daedalus Project on 'The Negro American'," ''Daedalus'', 140 (Winter 2011), 53–66.
* Geary, Daniel. ''Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy'' (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).
Geary, Daniel. " 'Racial self-help' or 'Blaming the Victim' " ''Salon'', 19 July 2015
* Klass, Gary, Book review of William Ryan's ''
Blaming the Victim
Victim blaming occurs when the victim of a crime or any wrongful act is held entirely or partially at fault for the harm that befell them. There is historical and current prejudice against the victims of domestic violence and sex crimes, such as t ...
'' (1976)
1995
*
Irving Kristol, Kristol, Irving (August 1971)
"The Best of Intentions, the Worst of Results" ''
The Atlantic
''The Atlantic'' is an American magazine and multi-platform publisher. It features articles in the fields of politics, foreign affairs, business and the economy, culture and the arts, technology, and science.
It was founded in 1857 in Boston, ...
,'' discusses Moynihan and his critics
Massey, Douglas S., and Robert J. Sampson, "Moynihan Redux: Legacies and Lessons" ''Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science,'' 621 (Jan. 2009), 6–27.
* Patterson, James T. ''Freedom Is Not Enough: The Moynihan Report and America's Struggle Over Black Family Life From LBJ to Obama'' (Basic Books; 2010)
*
Wilson, William Julius"The Moynihan Report and Research on the Black Community" ''Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science,'' 621 (Jan. 2009), 34–46.
External links
* A
annotated versionof the report from ''The Atlantic''
* Office of Policy Planning and Research,
United States Department of Labor
The United States Department of Labor (DOL) is one of the executive departments of the U.S. federal government. It is responsible for the administration of federal laws governing occupational safety and health, wage and hour standards, unemploym ...
(March 1965)
The Negro Family: The Case For National Action – Moynihan Report, hosted by Department of Labor, 1965
{{DEFAULTSORT:Negro Family
African-American documents
Black studies publications
Works about families
1965 documents
African-American gender relations
Politics and race in the United States