The Moynihan Report

Sobering findings after 1965 study is revisited.

From the wild Irish slums of the 19th-century Eastern seaboard to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles is one unmistakable lesson in American history: a community that allows large numbers of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future–that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder. . .are not only to be expected, they are very near to inevitable." - Daniel Moynihan-1965.

It's a statement that rings true today, just as it did sixty years ago.

Everyone should read the Moynihan Report. This document, known then as "The Negro Family: The Case For National Action," held that many of the problems of American blacks resulted from the instability of black urban families. The report was leaked to the media in July 1965, one month before the devastating riots in Watts, and called for more government action to improve the economic prospects of black families. 

Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a sociologist and assistant secretary for policy planning and research at the Labor Department. He became a prominent U.S. Senator representing New York and later served as an adviser to President Richard Nixon. 

Moynihan urged that the Federal Government adopt a national policy to reconstruct the black family. He laid out clear arguments, noting that the real cause of the troubles in the black community was not so much segregation or a lack of voting power. He recognized the structure of the Negro family was highly "unstable and in many urban centers…approaching complete breakdown."

Moynihan presciently revealed that African-American inequality is rooted primarily in family structure. He hoped to draw attention to the more profound social and economic inequities faced by African Americans, especially the absence of job opportunities for black men that prevented them from serving as family breadwinners. Moynihan meant for the report to serve as a call to action and planned social and political intervention. 

Mr. Moynihan was ostracized for his findings when this report was released. Critics came from all corners of society. Civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis spoke out angrily against the account. Others say it assumes that middle-class American values are the correct values for everyone in America. They suggested that he believed everyone should have a family structure like his own.

Although some of our government's most intrusive policies have changed over the years, and social progress has created several opportunities for people in many black communities, our country still struggles with many of the problems Moynihan identified back in 1965. Life hasn't been much easier for many people with low incomes. 

Five decades after Moynihan's work, white families exhibit the same rates of nonmarital childbearing and single parenting as black families did in the 1960s when Moynihan sounded his alarm. Meanwhile, the disintegration of the black nuclear family continued apace. Since the publication of the Moynihan Report, the proportion of African American children born outside of marriage has ballooned from 24 percent to 70 percent.

The decline of traditional families across racial and ethnic groups indicates that factors driving the decline do not lie solely within the black community but in the larger social and economic context. Nevertheless, the consequences of these trends in family structure may be felt disproportionately among blacks as their children are far more likely to be born into and raised in father-absent families than are white children.

A report written by the Urban Institute called The Moynihan Report Revisited was published in 2013. In the report, the Urban Institute points out: 

"Today, the share of white children born outside marriage is about the same as the share of black children born outside marriage in Moynihan's day." "The percentage of black children born to unmarried mothers, in comparison, tripled between the early 1960s and 2009, remaining far higher than the percentage of white children born to unmarried mothers."

One of the critical things to understand is how many strands are attached to this web of problems. We can choose not to address family stability or continue to throw money at the consequences of broken homes. There are more opportunities for black families today. The black middle class has grown, but the challenges undermining sustained and widespread economic prosperity remain stubborn. Chief among those challenges is the disproportionate share of black children living in single-parent homes.

Although Moynihan was criticized academically and beyond, subsequent events have proven him correct. The rate of unmarried births among whites today is considerably higher than the 1965 rate among blacks, which troubled Moynihan enough to issue his bombshell report. An estimated half of all children in the United States today live with a single mother at some point before they turn eighteen. This portends many different outcomes, but few of them are good. 

Family is about security, power, and resources. Having more than one parent increases all three. The outcomes of families with more than one parent far outstrip those of single-parent families. Years of studies show that kids who grow up in single-women-headed families don't fare well. They're more likely to do poorly in school, drop out, be arrested, and become single parents themselves. These factors reinforce the economic disadvantages children often face in these communities.

Racial and class inequality are again on the national agenda, just like when Moynihan wrote his report back in 1965. He was correct when he predicted how exposing so many black children, especially males, to fatherless families would prevent them from seizing new opportunities through the civil rights revolution. There are many other contributing factors, but blacks in America are still falling behind others in educational achievement, employment rates, and earnings because of the continuing demise of married-couple families.

Today, blacks also have much higher crime and incarceration rates. These facts have led to a growing recognition that the promise of the civil rights revolution won't be achieved until the black family is repaired. 

Clayton Craddock is a devoted father of two, an accomplished musician, and a thought-provoker dedicated to Socratic questioning, challenging the status quo, and encouraging a deeper contemplation on various issues. Subscribe to Think Things Through HERE, and for inquiries and to connect, email him here: Clayton@claytoncraddock.com.