Give Now  »

WFIU encourages and welcomes the online and on-air participation of responsible commentators from among the general public. The views expressed here are not necessarily those of WFIU, and we will make time and space for opposing viewpoints in response to this message. If you would like to Speak Your Mind on WFIU, read our guidelines and contact us to get started.

The Moynihan Report at Fifty

What the Baltimore riots show is that we are still a long way from achieving what Moynihan characterized as “equality as a fact,” or even knowing how to do so.

Fifty years ago, a little-known Labor Department official, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, wrote a report that was criticized at the time, but after the past month’s riots in Baltimore, has come to look prophetic.

Entitled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, it warned that the United States was on the verge of a “new crisis in race relations.” Using lots of data, Moynihan showed that an increasing number of African-American children were growing up in homes headed by single women. As a result, he argued, they risked entrapment in “a tangle of pathology,” living in neighborhoods with high rates of delinquency, crime, and poverty.

Moynihan, who later became a United States Senator, cited the effects of slavery, prejudice, and the economic problems of black men among the causes. While he offered no solutions, his report was the basis for President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 graduation speech at Howard University, which called for a new and “more profound” stage of the Civil Rights movement, focused on achieving “equality as a fact” not just “equality as a right.”

Nonetheless, Moynihan’s report was widely denounced as “blaming the victim,” holding blacks responsible for their own plight. Policy experts and political leaders for over a generation disputed his analysis or avoided it, although more accept it today.

Yet, in the Baltimore neighborhood where rioting occurred, nearly 40 percent of families, containing even more children, are headed by a single parent, while the poverty-rate is twice the city’s, just as Moynihan would have expected. What the Baltimore riots show is that we are still a long way from achieving “equality as a fact,” or even knowing how to do so.

Sources:

Moynihan Report
Johnson commencement address
James T. Patterson, Freedom is Not Enough: The Moynihan Report and America’s Struggle over Black Family Life – from LBJ to Obama, Basic Books, 2010.
Baltimore (Sandtown) demographics

Leslie Lenkowsky

Leslie Lenkowsky is professor of the practice of public affairs and philanthropy at Indiana University. He served in the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

What is RSS? RSS makes it possible to subscribe to a website's updates instead of visiting it by delivering new posts to your RSS reader automatically. Choose to receive some or all of the updates from Speak Your Mind:

WFIU is on Twitter

π