On New Year’s Eve, 1964, Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan assembled his staff in his office to announce that they were going to help him write a report on African American families. The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, completed in March, 1965, became one of the most controversial documents of the twentieth century. Best known as the “Moynihan Report,” it launched the career of its author, who became a professor at Harvard University, a top adviser to President Nixon, and a four-term U.S. senator representing New York. Moynihan wrote the report on his own initiative hoping to persuade White House officials that civil-rights legislation alone would not produce racial equality. He succeeded in getting President Johnson’s attention. On June 4, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson gave a major address at Howard University based largely on the Moynihan Report and co-written by Moynihan and Richard Goodwin. Echoing civil-rights leaders of the time, Johnson declared, “Freedom is not enough”: Equal citizenship for African Americans was incomplete without the ability to make a decent living. However, the Johnson administration quickly disowned the Moynihan Report when it sparked heated debate after becoming public in August, 1965. Distracted by the Vietnam War, Johnson never followed up his stirring rhetoric at Howard with significant new policies. The Moynihan Report became a lightning rod for civil-rights activists frustrated with Johnson’s inaction. Moreover, the report’s ambiguities and contradictions as well as Moynihan’s decision to discuss racial inequality primarily in terms of family structure produced confusion over its aims. Many liberals understood the report to advocate new policies to alleviate race-based economic inequalities. But conservatives found in the report a convenient rationalization for inequality; they argued that only racial self-help could produce the necessary changes in family structure. Some even used the report to reinforce racist stereotypes about loose family morality among African Americans. Meanwhile, left-wing critics attacked Moynihan for distracting attention from ongoing systemic racism by focusing on African Americans’ family characteristics: Moynihan’s leading critic, William Ryan, famously charged him with “blaming the victim.” The Moynihan Report is a historical artifact best understood in the context of its time. Yet it remains relevant today amidst current discussion of why racial inequality persists despite the passage of civil-rights legislation. Even those who do not see the report’s analysis as pertinent to the present can learn how it shaped contemporary discourse. Fifty years later, the Moynihan Report is still a contested symbol among American thinkers and policymakers, cited by everyone from Barack Obama to Paul Ryan. Earlier this month, New York City’s police commissioner and mayor publicly sparred over the report with the former calling it “prescient” and the latter dismissing it as outdated. Liberals and conservatives alike praise the report’s analysis, but it is still anathema to many on the Left. To aid readers interested in exploring the report and the issues it raises, The Atlantic is publishing this annotated copy of The Negro Family. Please note that this version differs from the original in that many of the report’s tables and charts are not reproduced. The Negro Family: The Case For National Action Office of Policy Planning and Research United States Department of Labor The United States is approaching a new crisis in race relations. Moynihan began his report in deliberately jarring fashion by warning of a “new crisis in race relations.” His audience was top White House officials whom he feared were convinced that civil-rights legislation alone would bring about racial equality. Chapters The Negro American Revolution The Negro American Family The Roots of the Problem The Tangle of Pathology The Case for National Action In the decade that began with the school desegregation decision of the Supreme Court, and ended with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed racial discrimination as well as discrimination on the basis of gender, religion, or national origin. It was the legislative death-knell for the system of Jim Crow segregation that had prevailed in the South since the late 19th century, the demand of Negro Americans for full recognition of their civil rights was finally met. The effort, no matter how savage and brutal, of some State and local governments to thwart the exercise of those rights is doomed. The nation will not put up with it—least of all the Negroes. The present moment will pass. In the meantime, a new period is beginning. Moynihan’s confidence that African Americans would soon enjoy equal legal rights alarmed some civil-rights leaders, including one NAACP official who feared that the Moynihan Report gave the misimpression that the battle for civil rights was, “all over but the shouting.” In this new period the expectations of the Negro Americans will go beyond civil rights. Being Americans, they will now expect that in the near future equal opportunities for them as a group will produce roughly equal results, as compared with other groups. This is not going to happen. Nor will it happen for generations to come unless a new and special effort is made. There are two reasons. First, the racist virus in the American blood stream still afflicts us: Negroes will encounter serious personal prejudice for at least another generation. Second, three centuries of sometimes unimaginable mistreatment have taken their toll on the Negro people. The harsh fact is that as a group, at the present time, in terms of ability to win out in the competitions of American life, they are not equal to most of those groups with which they will be competing. Individually, Negro Americans reach the highest peaks of achievement. But collectively, in the spectrum of American ethnic and religious and regional groups, where some get plenty and some get none, where some send eighty percent of their children to college and others pull them out of school at the 8th grade, Negroes are among the weakest. The most difficult fact for white Americans to understand is that in these terms the circumstances of the Negro American community in recent years has probably been getting worse, not better. Indices of dollars of income, standards of living, and years of education deceive. The gap between the Negro and most other groups in American society is widening. The fundamental problem, in which this is most clearly the case, is that of family structure. The evidence—not final, but powerfully persuasive—is that the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling. A middle class group has managed to save itself, but for vast numbers of the unskilled, poorly educated city working class the fabric of conventional social relationships has all but disintegrated. There are indications that the situation may have been arrested in the past few years, but the general post war trend is unmistakable. So long as this situation persists, the cycle of poverty and disadvantage will continue to repeat itself. The thesis of this paper is that these events, in combination, confront the nation with a new kind of problem. Measures that have worked in the past, or would work for most groups in the present, will not work here. A national effort is required that will give a unity of purpose to the many activities of the Federal government in this area, directed to a new kind of national goal: the establishment of a stable Negro family structure. This would be a new departure for Federal policy. And a difficult one. But it almost certainly offers the only possibility of resolving in our time what is, after all, the nation's oldest, and most intransigent, and now its most dangerous social problem. What Gunnar MyrdalGunnar Myrdal was a Swedish economist hired by the Carnegie Corporation to study U.S. race relations. His 1944 book, An American Dilemma, remained the most prominent study of African Americans at the time Moynihan was writing. Myrdal’s optimism that American democracy could overcome the unjust treatment of African Americans influenced mid-20th-century liberals such as Moynihan. said in An American Dilemma remains true today: “America is free to chose whether the Negro shall remain her liability or become her opportunity.” Chapter I. The Negro American Revolution The Negro American revolution is rightly regarded as the most important domestic event of the postwar period in the United States. Nothing like it has occurred since the upheavals of the 1930’s which led to the organization of the great industrial trade unions, and which in turn profoundly altered both the economy and the political scene. There have been few other events in our history—the American Revolution itself, the surge of Jacksonian Democracy in the 1830’s, the Abolitionist movement, and the Populist movement of the late 19th Century—comparable to the current Negro movement. There has been none more important. The Negro American revolution holds forth the prospect that the American Republic, which at birth was flawed by the institution of Negro slavery, and which throughout its history has been marred by the unequal treatment of Negro citizens, will at last redeem the full promise of the Declaration of Independence. Although the Negro leadership has conducted itself with the strictest propriety, acting always and only as American citizens asserting their rights within the framework of the American political system, it is no less clear that the movement has profound international implications. Like other policymakers, Moynihan weighed Cold War imperatives when considering African American rights. He worried that Communists used the mistreatment of African Americans as propaganda and damaged American efforts to influence new nations in Africa and Asia. It was in no way a matter of chance that the nonviolent tactics and philosophy of the movement, as it began in the South, were consciously adapted from the techniques by which the Congress Party undertook to free the Indian nation from British colonial rule. It was not a matter of chance that the Negro movement caught fire in America at just that moment when the nations of Africa were gaining their freedom. Nor is it merely incidental that the world should have fastened its attention on events in the United States at a time when the possibility that the nations of the world will divide along color lines seems suddenly not only possible, but even imminent. (Such racist views have made progress within the Negro American community itself—which can hardly be expected to be immune to a virus that is endemic in the white community. The Black Muslim doctrines, based on total alienation from the white world, exert a powerful influence. On the far left, the attraction of Chinese Communism can no longer be ignored.) Moynihan made a common liberal argument of the time that social reforms were needed to forestall the growth of African American radicalism. He especially worried about the Nation of Islam, a black- nationalist religion that rapidly gained membership in the early 1960s. Its one-time spokesperson, Malcolm X, drew attention with his barbed criticisms of American racism and rejection of nonviolent resistance in favor of self-defense. In pointing to the danger of “Chinese Communism,” Moynihan referred to the Revolutionary Action Movement, a Marxist-Leninist and black-nationalist organization founded in 1963 It is clear that what happens in America is being taken as a sign of what can, or must, happen in the world at large. The course of world events will be profoundly affected by the success or failure of the Negro American revolution in seeking the peaceful assimilation of the races in the United States. The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Dr. Martin Luther King was as much an expression of the hope for the future, as it was recognition for past achievement. It is no less clear that carrying this revolution forward to a successful conclusion is a first priority confronting the Great Society. The Great Society was the name given to Lyndon Johnson’s domestic program and included civil rights legislation, Medicaid and Medicare, expanded support for the arts, and the War on Poverty. Moynihan thought Johnson’s antipoverty measures were too limited and hoped his report would make a case for expanding them. Moynihan especially favored stronger measures to reduce unemployment and family allowances that would provide every American family a guaranteed minimum annual income. The End of the Beginning The major events of the onset of the Negro revolution are now behind us. The political events were three: First, the Negroes themselves organized as a mass movement. Their organizations have been in some ways better disciplined and better led than any in our history. They have established an unprecedented alliance with religious groups throughout the nation and have maintained close ties with both political parties and with most segments of the trade union movement. Second, the Kennedy-Johnson Administration committed the Federal government to the cause of Negro equality. This had never happened before. Third, the 1964 Presidential election was practically a referendum on this commitment: if these were terms made by the opposition, they were in effect accepted by the President. The overwhelming victory of President Johnson must be taken as emphatic popular endorsement of the unmistakable, and openly avowed course which the Federal government has pursued under his leadership. Moynihan believed that Johnson’s 1964 landslide victory over Republican Barry Goldwater opened opportunities for new reform programs of the kind he hoped his report would stimulate. The administrative events were threefold as well: First, beginning with the establishment of the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity and on to the enactment of the Manpower Development and Training Act of 1962, the Federal government has launched a major national effort to redress the profound imbalance between the economic position of the Negro citizens and the rest of the nation that derives primarily from their unequal position in the labor market. Second, the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 Here Moynihan refers to the principal legislation of the War on Poverty, that established the Office of Economic Opportunity began a major national effort to abolish poverty, a condition in which almost half of Negro families are living. Third, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 marked the end of the era of legal and formal discrimination against Negroes and created important new machinery for combating covert discrimination and unequal treatment. (The Act does not guarantee an end to harassment in matters such as voter registration, but does make it more or less incumbent upon government to take further steps to thwart such efforts when they do occur.) The Voting Rights Act was signed into law in August, 1965. Moynihan assumed, perhaps too optimistically, that African Americans would soon enjoy full civil and political rights. The legal events were no less specific. Beginning with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, through the decade that culminated in the recent decisions upholding Title II of the Civil Rights Act, the Federal judiciary, led by the Supreme Court, has used every opportunity to combat unequal treatment of Negro citizens. It may be put as a general proposition that the laws of the United States now look upon any such treatment as obnoxious, and that the courts will strike it down wherever it appears. The Demand for Equality With these events behind us, the nation now faces a different set of challenges, which may prove more difficult to meet, if only because they cannot be cast as concrete propositions of right and wrong. The fundamental problem here is that the Negro revolution, like the industrial upheaval of the 1930’s, is a movement for equality as well as for liberty. In this section, Moynihan registered the demands of the civil-rights movement for economic equality. Major civil-rights organizations advanced ambitious plans to combat poverty, which disproportionately affected African Americans. The 1963 March on Washington at which King delivered his “I have a dream” speech was for “Jobs and Freedom.” National Urban League leader Whitney Young, Jr., called in 1963 for a “Domestic Marshall Plan” to rebuild urban areas and close the economic gap between blacks and whites. Young’s proposal partly inspired Moynihan’s report. Liberty and Equality are the twin ideals of American democracy. But they are not the same thing. Nor, most importantly, are they equally attractive to all groups at any given time nor yet are they always compatible, one with the other. Many persons who would gladly die for liberty are appalled by equality. Many who are devoted to equality are puzzled and even troubled by liberty. Much of the political history of the American nation can be seen as a competition between these two ideals, as for example, the unending troubles between capital and labor. By and large, liberty has been the ideal with the higher social prestige in America. It has been the middle class aspiration, par excellence. (Note the assertions of the conservative right that ours is a republic, not a democracy.) Equality, on the other hand, has enjoyed tolerance more than acceptance. Yet it has roots deep in Western civilization and “is at least coeval with, if not prior to, liberty in the history of Western political thought.”1 American democracy has not always been successful in maintaining a balance between these two ideals, and notably so where the Negro American is concerned. “Lincoln freed the slaves,” but they were given liberty, not equality. It was therefore possible in the century that followed to deprive their descendants of much of their liberty as well. The ideal of equality does not ordain that all persons end up, as well as start out equal. In traditional terms, as put by Faulkner, “there is no such thing as equality per se, but only equality to: equal right and opportunity to make the best one can of one’s life within one’s capability, without fear of injustice or oppression or threat of violence,”2 But the evolution of American politics, with the distinct persistence of ethnic and religious groups, has added a profoundly significant new dimension to that egalitarian ideal. It is increasingly demanded that the distribution of success and failure within one group be roughly comparable to that within other groups. It is not enough that all individuals start out on even terms, if the members of one group almost invariably end up well to the fore, and those of another far to the rear. This is what ethnic politics are all about in America, and in the main the Negro American demands are being put forth in this now traditional and established framework.3 Here a point of semantics must be grasped. The demand for Equality of Opportunity has been generally perceived by white Americans as a demand for liberty, a demand not to be excluded from the competitions of life—at the polling place, in the scholarship examinations, at the personnel office, on the housing market. Liberty does, of course, demand that everyone be free to try his luck, or test his skill in such matters. But these opportunities do not necessarily produce equality: on the contrary, to the extent that winners imply losers, equality of opportunity almost insures inequality of results. The point of semantics is that equality of opportunity now has a different meaning for Negroes than it has for whites. It is not (or at least no longer) a demand for liberty alone, but also for equality—in terms of group results. In Bayard Rustin's terms, “It is now concerned not merely with removing the barriers to full opportunity but with achieving the fact of equality.”4 By equality Rustin means a distribution of achievements among Negroes roughly comparable to that among whites. Bayard Rustin, the organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, was a civil-rights leader and socialist who continuously linked racial equality to the right to earn a decent living. However, Moynihan misconstrued Rustin’s demand as insisting on parity between African Americans and whites. In fact, Rustin advocated extensive economic programs to combat poverty among all Americans as outlined in his $100 billion Freedom Budget unveiled with A. Philip Randolph in 1966, and endorsed by major civil-rights leaders. Rustin was an early critic of the Moynihan Report, claiming that it was “ambivalent about the basic reforms that are needed.” As Nathan Glazer Nathan Glazer, a prominent sociologist, was an important influence on Moynihan’s understanding of American race relations. Glazer and Moynihan collaborated in writing the landmark Beyond the Melting Pot, a 1963 study of ethnoracial groups in New York City. The Moynihan Report was marked by Glazer’s arguments that American society was structured by competition between ethnoracial groups and that a group’s family structure significantly determined its level of economic achievement. has put it, “The demand for economic equality is now not the demand for equal opportunities for the equally qualified: it is now the demand for equality of economic results ... The demand for equality in education...has also become a demand for equality of results, of outcomes.”5 While Glazer thought demands for “equality of results” were illegitimate, Moynihan here accepted their validity. By advocating “equality of results” defined as roughly equal economic standing for African Americans, Moynihan offered a logical foundation for affirmative-action programs that later followed. Indeed, in a 1964 memo to Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz, Moynihan professed himself a believer in “quotas,” stating, “We have four centuries of exploitation to overcome and will not do so by giving Negroes an equal opportunity with whites who are now miles ahead.” President Johnson expressed a similar sentiment in his 1965 Howard University speech based on the Moynihan Report when he famously said, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say ‘you are free to compete with all the others’ and then still justly believe that you have been fair.” Some aspects of the new laws do guarantee results, in the sense that upon enactment and enforcement they bring about an objective that is an end in itself, e.g., the public accommodations titles of the Civil Rights Act. Other provisions are at once terminal and intermediary. The portions of the Civil Rights Act dealing with voting rights will no doubt lead to further enlargements of the freedom of the Negro American. But by and large, the programs that have been enacted in the first phase of the Negro revolution—Manpower Retraining, the Job Corps, Community Action, et al.—only make opportunities available. They cannot insure the outcome. By naming the principal programs of the War on Poverty and suggesting their inadequacy, Moynihan hinted at the need for new and expanded antipoverty programs as a solution to demands for racial equality. The principal challenge of the next phase of the Negro revolution is to make certain that equality of results will now follow. If we do not, there will be no social peace in the United States for generations. Here Moynihan warned that failure to achieve economic equality for African Americans would lead to social disorder. His warning seemed prescient when his report became public just prior to the Watts Riots of August, 1965. The Prospect for Equality The time, therefore, is at hand for an unflinching look at the present potential of Negro Americans to move from where they now are to where they want, and ought to be. There is no very satisfactory way, at present, to measure social health or social pathology within an ethnic, or religious, or geographical community. Data are few and uncertain, and conclusions drawn from them, including the conclusions that follow, are subject to the grossest error.* Nonetheless, the opportunities, no less than the dangers, of the present moment, demand that an assessment be made. That being the case, it has to be said that there is a considerable body of evidence to support the conclusion that Negro social structure, in particular the Negro family, battered and harassed by discrimination, injustice, and uprooting, is in the deepest trouble. While many young Negroes are moving ahead to unprecedented levels of achievement, many more are falling further and further behind. After an intensive study of the life of central Harlem, the board of directors of Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited, Inc. summed up their findings in one statement: “Massive deterioration of the fabric of society and its institutions...”6 It is the conclusion of this survey of the available national data, that what is true of central Harlem, can be said to be true of the Negro American world in general. If this is so, it is the single most important social fact of the United States today. * As much as possible, the statistics used in this paper refer to Negroes. However, certain data series are available only in terms of the white and nonwhite population. Where this is the case, the nonwhite data have been used as if they referred only to Negroes. This necessarily introduces some inaccuracies, but it does not appear to produce any significant distortions. In 1960, Negroes were 92.1 percent of all nonwhites. The remaining 7.9 percent is made up largely of Indians, Japanese, and Chinese. Moynihan wrote at a time when African Americans were overwhelmingly the largest racial minority in the U.S. The demography of the U.S. has radically changed since with mass immigration, especially from Asia and Latin America, sparked by the immigration-reform legislation passed in 1965, which eliminated race-based quotas. Moynihan, like many Americans at the time, tended to see American race relations in terms of black-and-white, despite the long-term presence of other groups. In a 1965 memo to President Johnson summarizing the report, however, he cited the success of Japanese- and Chinese-Americans as proof that racial minorities in the U.S. could overcome past racial oppression. Moynihan cited the “close knit family structure” of Japanese- and Chinese-Americans as a cause of their success and as evidence of the need to strengthen African American families. The combined male unemployment rates of these groups is lower than that of Negroes. In matters relating to family stability, the smaller groups are probably more stable. Thus 21 percent of Negro women who have ever married are separated, divorced, or their husbands are absent for other reasons. The comparable figure for Indians is 14 percent; Japanese, 7 percent; Chinese 6 percent. Therefore, the statistics on nonwhites generally understate the degree of disorganization of the Negro family and underemployment of Negro men. Chapter II. The Negro American Family At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family. Moynihan claimed that family instability was the main reason why African Americans would fail to achieve equal results with other American groups. He traced the roots of the problems he perceived in African American family structure to slavery and past discrimination. However, because Moynihan argued that African Americans’ own characteristics, and not ongoing institutional racism, explained their failure to compete on equal terms, some critics charged him with “blaming the victim.” It is the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community at the present time. There is probably no single fact of Negro American life so little understood by whites. The Negro situation is commonly perceived by whites in terms of the visible manifestation of discrimination and poverty, in part because Negro protest is directed against such obstacles, and in part, no doubt, because these are facts which involve the actions and attitudes of the white community as well. It is more difficult, however, for whites to perceive the effect that three centuries of exploitation have had on the fabric of Negro society itself. Here the consequences of the historic injustices done to Negro Americans are silent and hidden from view. But here is where the true injury has occurred: unless this damage is repaired, all the effort to end discrimination and poverty and injustice will come to little. The role of the family in shaping character and ability is so pervasive as to be easily overlooked. The family is the basic social unit of American life; it is the basic socializing unit. Moynihan’s assertion that the family was the basic unit of society derived in part from his Catholicism, which he credited with giving him the perspective that “family interests were perhaps the central objective of social policy” By and large, adult conduct in society is learned as a child. A fundamental insight of psychoanalytic theory, for example, is that the child learns a way of looking at life in his early years through which all later experience is viewed and which profoundly shapes his adult conduct. When Moynihan discussed the negative effects of family instability on childhood development, he wrote from personal experience. His father abandoned his family when Moynihan was 10 years old, which plunged the family from a comfortable middle-class life into a precarious existence during the Great Depression. Moynihan underwent psychotherapy to understand the effects of this childhood experience on his psyche. It may be hazarded that the reason family structure does not loom larger in public discussion of social issues is that people tend to assume that the nature of family life is about the same throughout American society. The mass media and the development of suburbia have created an image of the American family as a highly standardized phenomenon. It is therefore easy to assume that whatever it is that makes for differences among individuals or groups of individuals, it is not a different family structure. There is much truth to this; as with any other nation, Americans are producing a recognizable family system. Moynihan was writing at a time when most Americans accepted as he did the nuclear-family norm, even though many American families failed to conform to the ideal of a male breadwinner and female homemaker. But that process is not completed by any means. There are still, for example, important differences in family patterns surviving from the age of the great European migration to the United States, and these variations account for notable differences in the progress and assimilation of various ethnic and religious groups.7 A number of immigrant groups were characterized by unusually strong family bonds; these groups have characteristically progressed more rapidly than others. Here Moynihan reprised Glazer’s argument from Beyond the Melting Pot. But there is one truly great discontinuity in family structure in the United States at the present time: that between the white world in general and that of the Negro American.By claiming that the main differences in American family structure were racial, Moynihan overlooked significant class differences. Some criticized Moynihan for failing to control for class when comparing white and black families. The white family has achieved a high degree of stability and is maintaining that stability. By contrast, the family structure of lower class Negroes is highly unstable, and in many urban centers is approaching complete breakdown. N.b. There is considerable evidence that the Negro community is in fact dividing between a stable middle class group that is steadily growing stronger and more successful, and an increasingly disorganized and disadvantaged lower class group. There are indications, for example, that the middle class Negro family puts a higher premium on family stability and the conserving of family resources than does the white middle class family.8 The discussion of this paper is not, obviously, directed to the first group excepting as it is affected by the experiences of the second—an important exception. Moynihan clarifies here that he is writing specifically about lower-class families, a concern that anticipates later discussions by social scientists and journalists of an African American “underclass.” But because Moynihan’s report continually referred to “the Negro family” and his statistics were classified by race but not by class, he was criticized for not differentiating among African Americans. One civil-rights official complained that Moynihan “put all Negroes of all classes regardless of their economic, social, or cultural status together.” (See Chapter IV, The Tangle of Pathology.) There are two points to be noted in this context. First, the emergence and increasing visibility of a Negro middle class may beguile the nation into supposing that the circumstances of the remainder of the Negro community are equally prosperous, whereas just the opposite is true at present, and is likely to continue so. Second, the lumping of all Negroes together in one statistical measurement very probably conceals the extent of the disorganization among the lower-class group. If conditions are improving for one and deteriorating for the other, the resultant statistical averages might show no change. Further, the statistics on the Negro family and most other subjects treated in this paper refer only to a specific point in time. They are a vertical measure of the situation at a given movement. They do not measure the experience of individuals over time. Thus the average monthly unemployment rate for Negro males for 1964 is recorded as 9 percent. But during 1964, some 29 percent of Negro males were unemployed at one time or another. Similarly, for example, if 36 percent of Negro children are living in broken homes at any specific moment, it is likely that a far higher proportion of Negro children find themselves in that situation at one time or another in their lives. Nearly a Quarter of Urban Negro Marriages Are Dissolved. Nearly a quarter of Negro women living in cities who have ever married are divorced, separated, or are living apart from their husbands. The rates are highest in the urban Northeast where 26 percent of Negro women ever married are either divorced, separated, or have their husbands absent. On the urban frontier, the proportion of husbands absent is even higher. In New York City in 1960, it was 30.2 percent, not including divorces. Among ever-married nonwhite women in the nation, the proportion with husbands present declined in every age group over the decade 1950-60 as follows: [chart not reproduced] Although similar declines occurred among white females, the proportion of white husbands present never dropped below 90 percent except for the first and last age group.9 Nearly One-Quarter of Negro Births are now Illegitimate. Both white and Negro illegitimacy rates have been increasing, although from dramatically different bases. The white rate was 2 percent in 1940; it was 3.07 percent in 1963. In that period, the Negro rate went from 16.8 percent to 23.6 percent. The numbers that so alarmed Moynihan have risen dramatically since. In 2010, 73 percent of non-Hispanic black children were born out of wedlock. However, 29 percent of non-Hispanic white children were also born out of wedlock, a higher percentage than for blacks at the time Moynihan was writing. Some praise Moynihan for his prescience in identifying family trends for African Americans; however, he was no doubt mistaken in assuming the stability of white family structures. The number of illegitimate children per 1,000 live births increased by 11 among whites in the period 1940-63, but by 68 among nonwhites. There are, of course, limits to the dependability of these statistics. Moynihan’s statistics on out-of-wedlock births, which he employed despite the qualifications he noted, were controversial. The Bureau of Labor Statistics staff that helped compile the data warned Moynihan that different cultural standards meant that many white middle-class families hid illegitimate births while many lower-class blacks formed stable unions even when not legally married. The report’s most influential critic, William Ryan, repeated these charges and added that Moynihan neglected the facts that, as compared with whites, African Americans had reduced access to birth control, abortion, and adoption, and were more likely to lack the economic resources for marriage. There are almost certainly a considerable number of Negro children who, although technically illegitimate, are in fact the offspring of stable unions. On the other hand, it may be assumed that many births that are in fact illegitimate are recorded otherwise. Probably the two opposite effects cancel each other out. On the urban frontier, the nonwhite illegitimacy rates are usually higher than the national average, and the increase of late has been drastic. In the District of Columbia, the illegitimacy rate for nonwhites grew from 21.8 percent in 1950, to 29.5 percent in 1964. A similar picture of disintegrating Negro marriages emerges from the divorce statistics. Divorces have increased of late for both whites and nonwhites, but at a much greater rate for the latter. In 1940 both groups had a divorce rate of 2.2 percent. By 1964 the white rate had risen to 3.6 percent, but the nonwhite rate had reached 5.1 percent—40 percent greater than the formerly equal white rate. Almost One-Fourth of Negro Families are Headed by Females As a direct result of this high rate of divorce, separation, and desertion, a very large percent of Negro families are headed by females. While the percentage of such families among whites has been dropping since 1940, it has been rising among Negroes. The percent of nonwhite families headed by a female is more than double the percent for whites. Fatherless nonwhite families increased by a sixth between 1950 and 1960, but held constant for white families. Almost One-Fourth of Nonwhite Families Are Headed by a Woman U.S. Department of Labor It has been estimated that only a minority of Negro children reach the age of 18 having lived all their lives with both of their parents. Once again, this measure of family disorganization is found to be diminishing among white families and increasing among Negro families. The Breakdown of the Negro Family Has Led to a Startling Increase in Welfare Dependency. The majority of Negro children receive public assistance under the AFDC program at one point or another in their childhood. Commonly known as “welfare,” the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, originally Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), offered payments to mothers where fathers were absent. The program was already controversial at the time Moynihan was writing. Opposition to it would help fuel growing opposition to the liberal welfare state and eventually lead to the abolition of AFDC in 1996, which Moynihan adamantly opposed as a U.S. Senator. Moynihan’s concern about “welfare dependency” aided his report’s appeal to conservatives despite his advocacy of full male employment and family allowances as alternatives to welfare. At present, 14 percent of Negro children are receiving AFDC assistance, as against 2 percent of white children. Eight percent of white children receive such assistance at some time, as against 56 percent of nonwhites, according to an extrapolation based on HEW data. (Let it be noted, however, that out of a total of 1.8 million nonwhite illegitimate children in the nation in 1961, 1.3 million were not receiving aid under the AFDC program, although a substantial number have, or will, receive aid at some time in their lives.) Again, the situation may be said to be worsening. The AFDC program, deriving from the long established Mothers’ Aid programs, was established in 1935 principally to care for widows and orphans, although the legislation covered all children in homes deprived of parental support because one or both of their parents are absent or incapacitated. In the beginning, the number of AFDC families in which the father was absent because of desertion was less than a third of the total. Today it is two thirds. HEW estimates “that between two thirds and three fourths of the 50 percent increase from 1948 to 1955 in the number of absent father families receiving ADC may be explained by an increase in broken homes in the population.”10 Cases Opened Under AFDC Compared With Unemployment Rate for Nonwhite Males * Does not include cases opened under program which commenced in some states in 1961 of assistance to children whose fathers are present but unemployed. (U.S. Department of Labor) A 1960 study of Aid to Dependent Children in Cook County, Ill. stated: “The ‘typical’ ADC mother in Cook County was married and had children by her husband, who deserted; his whereabouts are unknown, and he does not contribute to the support of his children. She is not free to remarry and has had an illegitimate child since her husband left. (Almost 90 percent of the ADC families are Negro.)"11 The steady expansion of this welfare program, as of public assistance programs in general, can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States. Chapter III: The Roots of the Problem The most perplexing question abut American slavery, which has never been altogether explained, and which indeed most Americans hardly know exists, has been stated by Nathan Glazer as follows: “Why was American slavery the most awful the world has ever known?”12 The only thing that can be said with certainty is that this is true: It was. American slavery was profoundly different from, and in its lasting effects on individuals and their children, indescribably worse than, any recorded servitude, ancient or modern. The peculiar nature of American slavery was noted by Alexis de Tocqueville and others, but it was not until 1948 that Frank Tannenbaum, a South American specialist, pointed to the striking differences between Brazilian and American slavery. The notion that U.S. slavery was exceptionally inhumane was commonly accepted at the time Moynihan wrote but has since been convincingly disputed. The feudal, Catholic society of Brazil had a legal and religious tradition which accorded the slave a place as a human being in the hierarchy of society—a luckless, miserable place, to be sure, but a place withal. In contrast, there was nothing in the tradition of English law or Protestant theology which could accommodate to the fact of human bondage — the slaves were therefore reduced to the status of chattels — often, no doubt, well cared for, even privileged chattels, but chattels nevertheless. Glazer, also focusing on the Brazil-United States comparison, continues. “In Brazil, the slave had many more rights than in the United States: He could legally marry, he could, indeed had to, be baptized and become a member of the Catholic Church, his family could not be broken up for sale, and he had many days on which he could either rest or earn money to buy his freedom. The Government encouraged manumission, and the freedom of infants could often be purchased for a small sum at the baptismal font. In short: the Brazilian slave knew he was a man, and that he differed in degree, not in kind, from his master.”13 “[In the United States,] the slave was totally removed from the protection of organized society (compare the elaborate provisions for the protection of slaves in the Bible), his existence as a human being was given no recognition by any religious or secular agency, he was totally ignorant of and completely cut off from his past, and he was offered absolutely no hope for the future. His children could be sold, his marriage was not recognized, his wife could be violated or sold (there was something comic about calling the woman with whom the master permitted him to live a ‘wife’), and he could also be subject, without redress, to frightful barbarities—there were presumably as many sadists among slaveowners, men and women, as there are in other groups. The slave could not, by law, be taught to read or write; he could not practice any religion without the permission of his master, and could never meet with his fellows, for religious or any other purposes, except in the presence of a white; and finally, if a master wished to free him, every legal obstacle was used to thwart such action. This was not what slavery meant in the ancient world, in medieval and early modern Europe, or in Brazil and the West Indies. “More important, American slavery was also awful in its effects. If we compared the present situation of the American Negro with that of, let us say, Brazilian Negroes (who were slaves 20 years longer), we begin to suspect that the differences are the result of very different patterns of slavery. Today the Brazilian Negroes are Brazilians; though most are poor and do the hard and dirty work of the country, as Negroes do in the United States, they are not cut off from society. They reach into its highest strata, merging there—in smaller and smaller numbers, it is true, but with complete acceptance—with other Brazilians of all kinds. The relations between Negroes and whites in Brazil show nothing of the mass irrationality that prevails in this country.”14 Stanley M. Elkins, drawing on the aberrant behavior of the prisoners in Nazi concentration camps, drew an elaborate parallel between the two institutions. Stanley Elkins was a leading historian of slavery. He argued that slavery stripped African Americans of agency and culture. Later in the 1960s, historians challenged Elkins’s work by emphasizing widespread acts of slave resistance and the persistence of an autonomous slave culture with African roots. Though Elkins himself had not speculated about slavery’s effects on contemporary African Americans, his work lost credibility because of its close association with the Moynihan Report. This thesis has been summarized as follows by Thomas Pettigrew: “Both were closed systems, with little chance of manumission, emphasis on survival, and a single, omnipresent authority. The profound personality change created by Nazi internment, as independently reported by a number of psychologists and psychiatrists who survived, was toward childishness and total acceptance of the SS guards as father-figures—a syndrome strikingly similar to the ‘Sambo’ caricature of the Southern slave. Nineteenth-century racists readily believed that the ‘Sambo’ personality was simply an inborn racial type. Yet no African anthropological data have ever shown any personality type resembling Sambo; and the concentration camps molded the equivalent personality pattern in a wide variety of Caucasian prisoners. Nor was Sambo merely a product of ‘slavery’ in the abstract, for the less devastating Latin American system never developed such a type. “Extending this line of reasoning, psychologists point out that slavery in all its forms sharply lowered the need for achievement in slaves ... Negroes in bondage, stripped of their African heritage, were placed in a completely dependent role. All of their rewards came, not from individual initiative and enterprise, but from absolute obedience—a situation that severely depresses the need for achievement among all peoples. Most important of all, slavery vitiated family life ... Since many slaveowners neither fostered Christian marriage among their slave couples nor hesitated to separate them on the auction block, the slave household often developed a fatherless matrifocal (mother-centered) pattern.”15 The Reconstruction With the emancipation of the slaves, the Negro American family began to form in the United States on a widespread scale. But it did so in an atmosphere markedly different from that which has produced the white American family. The Negro was given liberty, but not equality. Life remained hazardous and marginal. Of the greatest importance, the Negro male, particularly in the South, became an object of intense hostility, an attitude unquestionably based in some measure of fear. When Jim Crow made its appearance towards the end of the 19th century, it may be speculated that it was the Negro male who was most humiliated thereby; the male was more likely to use public facilities, which rapidly became segregated once the process began, and just as important, segregation, and the submissiveness it exacts, is surely more destructive to the male than to the female personality. Keeping the Negro “in his place” can be translated as keeping the Negro male in his place: The female was not a threat to anyone. Moynihan’s almost exclusive concern with African American men overlooked the combination of racial and gender oppression faced by African American women. African American feminists sharply disputed this aspect of the Moynihan Report. Unquestionably, these events worked against the emergence of a strong father figure. The very essence of the male animal, from the bantam rooster to the four star general, is to strut. Moynihan’s assertion of the need of all males to “strut” was widely reported in the media in 1965 and later helped earn his report the scorn of feminists. Indeed, in 19th century America, a particular type of exaggerated male boastfulness became almost a national style. Not for the Negro male. The “sassy nigger[sic]” was lynched. In this situation, the Negro family made but little progress toward the middle class pattern of the present time. Margaret Mead has pointed out that while “In every known human society, everywhere in the world, the young male learns that when he grows up one of the things which he must do in order to be a full member of society is to provide food for some female and her young.”16 This pattern is not immutable, however: it can be broken, even though it has always eventually reasserted itself. “Within the family, each new generation of young males learn the appropriate nurturing behavior and superimpose upon their biologically given maleness this learned parental role. When the family breaks down—as it does under slavery, under certain forms of indentured labor and serfdom, in periods of extreme social unrest during wars, revolutions, famines, and epidemics, or in periods of abrupt transition from one type of economy to another—this delicate line of transmission is broken. Men may founder badly in these periods, during which the primary unit may again become mother and child, the biologically given, and the special conditions under which man has held his social traditions in trust are violated and distorted.”17 E. Franklin Frazier At the time Moynihan was writing, E. Franklin Frazier was the most influential scholar on African American families, though he had died in 1962. Moynihan titled his report The Negro Family as a tribute to Frazier, whose most famous work was entitled The Negro Family in the United States (1939). Moynihan followed Frazier in linking the struggles of African American families to slavery, Jim Crow, urbanization, and unemployment. However, Moynihan lacked Frazier’s concern with the lived experiences of African American families, his interest in the heterogeneity of black family structures, or his socialist critique of American society. Moynihan’s heavy use of Frazier forever changed the reception of Frazier’s scholarship. makes clear that at the time of emancipation Negro women were already “accustomed to playing the dominant role in family and marriage relations” and that this role persisted in the decades of rural life that followed. Urbanization Country life and city life are profoundly different. The gradual shift of American society from a rural to an urban basis over the past century and a half has caused abundant strains, many of which are still much in evidence. When this shift occurs suddenly, drastically, in one or two generations, the effect is immensely disruptive of traditional social patterns. It was this abrupt transition that produced the wild Irish slums of the 19th Century Northeast. Moynihan, trading on his Irish-American heritage, frequently compared African American ghettoes to 19th-century Irish slums, a subject he wrote about in Beyond the Melting Pot. Using stereotypical terms for Irish and African Americans, he even proclaimed in a 1967 Time interview, “Paddy and Sambo are the same people.” Drunkenness, crime, corruption, discrimination, family disorganization, juvenile delinquency were the routine of that era. In our own time, the same sudden transition has produced the Negro slum—different from, but hardly better than its predecessors, and fundamentally the result of the same process. Negroes are now more urbanized than whites. Moynihan was writing toward the end of the Great Migration, the period between 1910 and 1970 that saw six million African Americans leave the rural South for the cities of the Northeast, Midwest, and West. The decline of Southern agriculture and the growth of industrial jobs fueled this mass migration. Negro families in the cities are more frequently headed by a woman than those in the country. The difference between the white and Negro proportions of families headed by a woman is greater in the city than in the country. The promise of the city has so far been denied the majority of Negro migrants, and most particularly the Negro family. In 1939, E. Franklin Frazier described its plight movingly in that part of The Negro Family entitled “In the City of Destruction”: “The impact of hundreds of thousands of rural southern Negroes upon northern metropolitan communities presents a bewildering spectacle. Striking contrasts in levels of civilization and economic well being among these newcomers to modern civilization seem to baffle any attempt to discover order and direction in their mode of life.”18 “In many cases, of course, the dissolution of the simple family organization has begun before the family reaches the northern city. But, if these families have managed to preserve their integrity until they reach the northern city, poverty, ignorance, and color force them to seek homes in deteriorated slum areas from which practically all institutional life has disappeared. Hence, at the same time that these simple rural families are losing their internal cohesion, they are being freed from the controlling force of public opinion and communal institutions. Family desertion among Negroes in cities appears, then, to be one of the inevitable consequences of the impact of urban life on the simple family organization and folk culture which the Negro has evolved in the rural South. The distribution of desertions in relation to the general economic and cultural organization of Negro communities that have grown up in our American cities shows in a striking manner the influence of selective factors in the process of adjustment to the urban environment.”19 Frazier concluded his classic study, The Negro Family, with the prophesy that the “travail of civilization is not yet ended.” “First, it appears that the family which evolved within the isolated world of the Negro folk will become increasingly disorganized. Frazier wrote of family “disorganization” in terms of the tradition of Chicago School of Sociology from which he descended. “Disorganization” meant the unsettling of a group’s own norms due to changes in its environment such as migration, and it implied no moral judgment. However, when Moynihan used the term “disorganization” in the report, he tended to judge any family “disorganized” that did not meet the male-breadwinner model. Critics of Moynihan often accused him of unfairly judging working-class African American families by the cultural standards of middle-class white Americans. Modern means of communication will break down the isolation of the world of the black folk, and, as long as the bankrupt system of southern agriculture exists, Negro families will continue to seek a living in the towns and cities of the country. They will crowd the slum areas of southern cities or make their way to northern cities where their family life will become disrupted and their poverty will force them to depend upon charity.”20 In every index of family pathology—divorce, separation, and desertion, female family head, children in broken homes, and illegitimacy—the contrast between the urban and rural environment for Negro families is unmistakable. Harlem, into which Negroes began to move early in this century, is the center and symbol of the urban life of the Negro American. Conditions in Harlem are not worse, they are probably better than in most Negro ghettos. The social disorganization of central Harlem, comprising ten health areas, was thoroughly documented by the HARYOU report, save for the illegitimacy rates. These have now been made available to the Labor Department by the New York City Department of Health. There could hardly be a more dramatic demonstration of the crumbling—the breaking—of the family structure on the urban frontier. Unemployment and Poverty The impact of unemployment on the Negro family, and particularly on the Negro male, is the least understood of all the developments that have contributed to the present crisis. There is little analysis because there has been almost no inquiry. Unemployment, for whites and nonwhites alike, has on the whole been treated as an economic phenomenon, with almost no attention paid for at least a quarter-century to social and personal consequences. Moynihan wrote The Negro Family in part to highlight the negative social effects of unemployment, a key concern of the Department of Labor that issued his report. Moynihan specifically worried about male unemployment and the effects of male-breadwinner absence on families. He subscribed to the “family wage” ideology common among mid-century liberals, built around the belief that men were entitled to jobs that would enable them to be the primary supporters of wives and children. In 1940, Edward Wight Bakke Bakke was a Yale University professor of sociology and economics best known for his Depression-era studies of the effects of unemployment conducted in New Haven, Connecticut described the effects of unemployment on family structure in terms of six stages of adjustment.21 Although the families studied were white, the pattern would clearly seem to be a general one, and apply to Negro families as well. The first two stages end with the exhaustion of credit and the entry of the wife into the labor force. The father is no longer the provider and the elder children become resentful. The third stage is the critical one of commencing a new day to day existence. At this point two women are in charge: “Consider the fact that relief investigators or case workers are normally women and deal with the housewife. Already suffering a loss in prestige and authority in the family because of his failure to be the chief bread winner, the male head of the family feels deeply this obvious transfer of planning for the family's well being to two women, one of them an outsider. His role is reduced to that of errand boy to and from the relief office.”22 If the family makes it through this stage Bakke finds that it is likely to survive, and the rest of the process is one of adjustment. The critical element of adjustment was not welfare payments, but work. “Having observed our families under conditions of unemployment with no public help, or with that help coming from direct [sic] and from work relief, we are convinced that after the exhaustion of self produced resources, work relief is the only type of assistance which can restore the strained bonds of family relationship in a way which promises the continued functioning of that family in meeting the responsibilities imposed upon it by our culture.”23 Work is precisely the one thing the Negro family head in such circumstances has not received over the past generation.* The fundamental, overwhelming fact is that Negro unemployment, with the exception of a few years during World War II and the Korean War, has continued at disaster levels for 35 years. Once again, this is particularly the case in the northern urban areas to which the Negro population has been moving. The 1930 Census (taken in the spring, before the depression was in full swing) showed Negro unemployment at 6.1 percent, as against 6.6 percent for whites. But taking out the South reversed the relationship: white 7.4 percent, nonwhite 11.5 percent. By 1940, the 2 to 1 white-Negro unemployment relationship that persists to this day had clearly emerged. Taking out the South again, whites were 14.8 percent, nonwhites 29.7 percent. The unemployment rates for African Americans continue to be roughly double those of whites to the present day. In July, 2015, for example, the African American unemployment rate was 10.2 percent while the white rate was 4.7 percent. Since 1929, the Negro worker has been tremendously affected by the movements of the business cycle and of employment. He has been hit worse by declines than whites, and proportionately helped more by recoveries. From 1951 to 1963, the level of the Negro male unemployment was on a long run rising trend, while at the same time following the short run ups and downs of the business cycle. During the same period, the number of broken families in the Negro world was also on a long run rise, with intermediate ups and downs. A glance at the chart on page 22 reveals that the series move in the same directions—up and down together, with a long run rising trend—but that the peaks and troughs are 1 year out of phase. Thus unemployment peaks 1 year before broken families, and so on. By plotting these series in terms of deviation from trend, and moving the unemployment curve 1 year ahead, we see the clear relation of the two otherwise seemingly unrelated series of events; the cyclical swings in unemployment have their counterpart in increases and decreases in separations. This crucial finding of the Moynihan Report infers that family instability results from unemployment. It suggests that government can best strengthen African American families by improving employment opportunities for black men. The effect of recession unemployment on divorces further illustrates the economic roots of the problem. The nonwhite divorce rates dipped slightly in high unemployment years like 1954-55, 1958, and 1961-62. (See table 21 [not reproduced] on page 77). Divorce is expensive: those without money resort to separation or desertion. While divorce is not a desirable goal for a society, it recognizes the importance of marriage and family, and for children some family continuity and support is more likely when the institution of the family has been so recognized. The conclusion from these and similar data is difficult to avoid: During times when jobs were reasonably plentiful (although at no time during this period, save perhaps the first 2 years, did the unemployment rate for Negro males drop to anything like a reasonable level) the Negro family became stronger and more stable. As jobs became more and more difficult to find, the stability of the family became more and more difficult to maintain. This relation is clearly seen in terms of the illegitimacy rates of census tracts in the District of Columbia compared with male unemployment rates in the same neighborhoods. In 1963, a prosperous year, 29.2 percent of all Negro men in the labor force were unemployed at some time during the year. Almost half of these men were out of work 15 weeks or more. The impact of poverty on Negro family structure is no less obvious, although again it may not be widely acknowledged. There would seem to be an American tradition, agrarian in its origins but reinforced by attitudes of urban immigrant groups, to the effect that family morality and stability decline as income and social position rise. Over the years this may have provided some consolation to the poor, but there is little evidence that it is true. On the contrary, higher family incomes are unmistakably associated with greater family stability—which comes first may be a matter for conjecture, but the conjunction of the two characteristics is unmistakable. The Negro family is no exception. In the District of Columbia, for example, census tracts with median incomes over $8,000 had an illegitimacy rate one-th