In July 1965, an internal report from the U.S. Department of Labor was leaked to the press. The author was then-Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and the details of his report -- The Negro Family: The Case for National Action -- angered many leaders and supporters of the Civil Rights Movement. Moynihan's dire pronouncements on black family life in American ghettos ultimately pitted him, a lifelong New York Democrat and avowed champion of the urban poor, against the left for much of his political career. His liberal opponents accused him, in short, of ?"blaming the victim.?
Forty-five years after its release, James T. Patterson, a retired professor of history at Brown University and author of several books about twentieth century American political history, revisits the controversy surrounding Moynihan?s report in Freedom Is Not Enough: The Moynihan Report and America?s Struggle Over Black Family Life from LBJ to Obama. TAP wrestles with Patterson over the "tangle of pathology" at the heart of Moynihan?s critique of poor, black families.
Why were liberals so swift to condemn Moynihan?s sociology in The Negro Family?
You have to put this in the context of the time; the Civil Rights Movement had been largely united as an interracial, non-violent movement into 1964, but by early 1965 there were serious strains showing within the two most militant black organization, the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and by mid-summer of 1965 when the report was leaked and it was know that Moynihan wrote it, these strains were so serious that by the end of the year whites were being thrown out of both organizations. By early 1966 we had the phrase "black power" and both SNCC and CORE had become exclusively black organizations.
So the problem was that the report was leaked at a time when militant blacks were separating from whites and did not like to hear this very unflattering description of matriarchy, high illegitimacy rates, delinquency, crime, drug abuse -- it?s all in there. It's only a 78-page report, including 28 pages of appendices and notes, but it was hard-hitting, and full of information that nobody then or later seriously criticized; they just didn't like the tone.
Are you really suggesting that militant organizations were the only black leadership that was uncomfortable with the report?
President Johnson was having trouble with civil rights leaders in 1965 because they were reacting to what happened in Watts, which actually surprised most of them as much as it appalled Johnson. Ultimately, Johnson just didn't want to get into a fight with these people by supporting a report that they were opposing. Of course, he was also massively escalating the war in Vietnam and having trouble with white liberals as well. So he just didn't do anything, and the report died on the vine.
The rest of the book indicates how it was used and abused and discussed by later people -- by culturally moderate and conservative black thinkers in particular. Obama has done the same thing; he's talked about the report, he's supported it, he doesn't find it incendiary. Cosby doesn't find it incendiary. Some blacks still do.
You write about how, by the 1980s, figures like Eleanor Holmes Norton and Glenn Loury were revisiting the Moynihan report, willing to engage the data despite the tone. Why was that the case?
Moynihan wrote a number of articles during his most prolific time of writing for magazines at Harvard in the late 1960s, in which he deplored what he called "the great silence" of liberals who he thought, in their hearts, agreed with what he'd said in the report. He thought that they were afraid to say so because they were afraid to challenge militant black orthodoxy. I think that most black people were afraid to speak out and to present a disunited front to the world.
You address the revisionism of black slave family history. Why is slavery a potentially compelling explanation of marriage and birth rates in black communities to so many people?
Moynihan relied upon the best scholarly evidence out there in 1965, notably E. Franklin Frazier?s book in 1939, The Negro Family in the United States, but also earlier work by people like W.E.B. DuBois and others who presented statistics and arguments to show the disorganizing effect of slavery.
But what really slammed these problems home was the massive urbanization and industrialization of America and the problems that blacks particularly in the 1960s and thereafter had with very overcrowded central cities and lack of decent employment.
A number a critics have said, yes, there are real problems with black families in those areas where unemployment is generally high, but others have pointed out that the problem in black families is pretty much the same in areas where blacks live and where there is employment, and they're not getting employment because they?re not qualified for it, and they're not qualified for it because they're ill-educated, dropped out of school, all of these things that would indicate that there?s something else going on.
I would think that readers of your journal would be very uncomfortable with any interpretation that said, look, it's a cultural thing. Look, it's intergenerational. Look, it's deeper than just economics. And they would probably say that we've got to have a whole lot of unemployment programs. This is what Moynihan had in mind; he was worried about black unemployment.
But saying, ?"It?s a cultural thing,? "what does that even mean?
It means that, somehow or another, a lower-class black child is brought up in an environment similar to his mother -- and father, if he has one -- and that he sort of absorbs or imbibes their situation. Moynihan used to say that it's not cultural in any deep sense that you're born with it, or that it's genetic, or anything like that. But each generation goes through a process very similar to the previous one, and it's practically contagious. It's very hard to get away from.
