James T. Patterson: The Moynihan Future
[James T. Patterson is a professor emeritus of history at Brown and the author of “Freedom Is Not Enough: The Moynihan Report and America’s Struggle Over Black Family Life From L.B.J. to Obama.”]
FORTY-FIVE years ago this month, Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan began quietly circulating a report he had recently completed about the “tangle of pathology” — out-of-wedlock births, fatherless households — damaging low-income black families. The title said it all: “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.”
It proved enormously controversial and established its author’s reputation as an iconoclast, yet today the Moynihan Report is largely forgotten. Sadly, its predictions about the decline of the black family have proven largely correct....
...In 1963, a quarter of nonwhite births in the United States were out of wedlock, eight times the proportion among whites. Today the proportion of nonmarital births among non-Hispanic blacks exceeds 72 percent, compared with a proportion among non-Hispanic whites of around 28 percent....
There are no magic bullets for the rise of out-of-wedlock births, a trend rooted in the decline in marriage rates and one that has affected other western nations as well. But as Moynihan recommended, we can expand employment programs to help young black people find work....
None of this is cheap, or a guaranteed success. But if we do not act, the “tangle of pathology” that Moynihan described in 1965, having grown far worse, will be impossible to unravel, and America will become more deeply divided than ever along class and racial lines.
Read entire article at NYT
FORTY-FIVE years ago this month, Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan began quietly circulating a report he had recently completed about the “tangle of pathology” — out-of-wedlock births, fatherless households — damaging low-income black families. The title said it all: “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.”
It proved enormously controversial and established its author’s reputation as an iconoclast, yet today the Moynihan Report is largely forgotten. Sadly, its predictions about the decline of the black family have proven largely correct....
...In 1963, a quarter of nonwhite births in the United States were out of wedlock, eight times the proportion among whites. Today the proportion of nonmarital births among non-Hispanic blacks exceeds 72 percent, compared with a proportion among non-Hispanic whites of around 28 percent....
There are no magic bullets for the rise of out-of-wedlock births, a trend rooted in the decline in marriage rates and one that has affected other western nations as well. But as Moynihan recommended, we can expand employment programs to help young black people find work....
None of this is cheap, or a guaranteed success. But if we do not act, the “tangle of pathology” that Moynihan described in 1965, having grown far worse, will be impossible to unravel, and America will become more deeply divided than ever along class and racial lines.