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
