The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, the 78-page report written by a then 38-year old Daniel Patrick ‘Pat’ Moynihan, an assistant secretary of labor for policy in the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, was never supposed to see the light of day.

The Negro Family, which later came to be widely known simply as “The Moynihan Report,” did not even originally have Moynihan’s name on it’s cover–the document was only meant to be distributed to high-ranking members of the Johnson administration in order to spur discussion regarding what policies could be implemented in order to assist the Negro family with the task of fully integrating society. But, Moynihan was also issuing a warning. The Negro family was already suffering rates of familial disintegration, poverty, and out-of-wedlock pregnancy at rates far higher than white families; if something was not done soon, he warned that the problems of lower class blacks (i.e., a “tangle of pathology”) may well become self-perpetuating, if they had not become self-perpetuating already.

To the dismay of many within the Johnson administration, including Moynihan himself, the Report was leaked to the press. Black leaders and leaders were less than impressed with the way that Moynihan described the black family, using language that they felt was overly pessimistic and which blamed the victim instead of blaming the racism of whites. The usage of the phrase “tangle of pathology” to describe the multitude of problems in which lower class blacks were often enmeshed infuriated black leaders. Before the report had even been officially released to the public, articles appeared attempting to call Moynihan’s words and intentions in writing the report into question.

Eleanor Holdmes Norton, civil rights activist, graduate of Yale Law School, and feminist, was one of the few black leaders who agreed with what Moynihan wrote in his report:

As far back as the early 1970’s she had tried unsuccessfully to get civil rights leaders–most of them men–to pay more attention to the needs of black families. Discouraged by the response, she had defended the Moynihan Report to [Ken] Auletta, observing sadly, “that it had to come from a white person tells you about the failure of black leadership.” (Freedom Is Not Enough, author James T. Patterson)

Some black scholars such as Herbert G. Gutman, author of the tome’The Black family in slavery and freedom, 1750-1925′ insisted that although the black family has not come out of slavery unscathed, blacks were “resilient”–black families had retained an extended family structure to support each other and to protect against the vicissitudes of life during slavery and Jim Crow. According to the Gutman, the black family members should be praised for their adaptiveness in response to the conditions of racism. This insistence that there was really nothing wrong with black families–white racism was the real problem–deflected attention away from arguments seeking to create policies to help ‘heal’ the black family; if the black family isn’t broken, then why continue to talk about fixing it?

President Johnson, who was seeking to keep support of the Vietnam war high and needed that support in order to ramp up the war efforts, did not want to simultaneously request funds to divert towards social programs designed to assist the black poor.

And then, in mid-August of 1965, riots erupted in the Watts area of Los Angeles, California. The racial tension in the Watts neighborhood erupted into violence that lasted 6 days until being squashed by the National Guard. Despite the fact that blacks were rioting after a long period of being discriminated against and outright harassed, many white Americans began to see blacks as being ungrateful and unworthy of having their needs assuaged or their complaints addressed.

At the time the report was released, some feminists felt that too much ink was being spent writing about the problems of black men. Why should the focus be on black men when it was black women who–by working low-wage, unskilled, dead-end jobs–were raising children alone in impoverished and often violent surroundings? Moynihan was referring to the black community as being a matriarchy, yet the majority of black women were struggling just to make ends meet.

The black family continued to take a metaphorical beating while everyone was discussing and disagreeing with each other. Drugs became more easily and more widely available with black communities in the 60’s and 70’s, which lead to an increase in crime and problems related to drug addiction. Mass incarceration of black males facilitated the creation of a pseudo-prison culture among young black men.

Finally, decades after the Moynihan Report had been published, black academics, scholars, and other public figures began to speak out about effects of the disintegration of the family on black Americans. Comedian Bill Cosby gave his infamous speech before a meeting of the NAACP about the reckless behavior of lower class blacks. John McWhorter wrote Losing the Race, a book about how blacks were falling further and further behind the rest of society due to their own failure to adapt and acclimate the standards and mores that were allowing all other racial and ethnic groups to improve their standing.

Over 40 years after The Negro Family, all that has happened is talk. The Million Man March, a historic event that was supposed to encourage black men to step up and fully participate in the healing of black families had virtually no effect.

Barack Obama has done nothing directly to help black families, besides giving a few speeches in black churches where he admonishes black men for their failure to be loving husbands and fathers. Obama has talked, but he has done nothing to change policy in any way that would turn the tide on the unraveling of the black family. When 20 children were killed in a mass shooting in Newtowne, CT, the President announced proposals addressing gun control approximately 2 months later. How many black men were killed in Chicago and Detroit last year and yet the President has committed to no efforts to either modify or create new public policy to help black men or black families?

At this point, it remains highly doubtful that there will be a turning of the tide. For the last 40 plus years the trends that Moynihan pointed out, particularly that of rising rates of out-of-wedlock children, have been increasing, not just for blacks but for all Americans, although blacks still have by far the highest rate of out-of-wedlock childbearing. The black family has become ever more fragile, with fewer and fewer black children expected to grow up in a home with 2 parents. And, this at time when family structure is a better predictor of whether or not a child will be successful in life than that child’s race. Children who grow up in a single-parent home are truly the disadvantaged, just like Danial Patrick Moynihan predicted.
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Jamila Akil is a Senior Editor at Beyond Black and White. You can follow her on Twitter @jamilaakil