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March 31, 2005
A missed opportunity?
Forty years ago in March, the U.S. Department of
Labor published an historic study entitled “The Negro Family:
The Case for National Action.” This became known as the
Moynihan Report after its author, the late U.S. Senator Daniel
Patrick Moynihan, who was then undersecretary of labor. Moynihan
was President Lyndon Johnson’s stalking horse to develop
a strategy for attaining full equality for African Americans.
Moynihan left no doubt about his intentions. President Johnson
had signed the Civil Rights Act the prior August. He believed
that after outlawing racial discrimination in education, employment
and places of public accommodation, the focus would shift away
from civil rights.
In his preface to the report Moynihan stated, “In this new
period [since the Civil Rights Act of 1964] the expectations of
the Negro Americans will go beyond civil rights. Being Americans,
they will now expect that in the near future equal rights for
them will produce roughly equal results, as compared with other
groups.”
Moynihan then correctly asserted, “that is not going to
happen. Nor will it happen for generations to come unless a new
special effort is made.” Moynihan clearly distinguished
between liberty (the freedom that was attained with passage of
the Civil Rights Act) and equality. He stated, “liberty
and equality are the twin ideals of American democracy. But they
are not the same thing.”
The “special effort” Moynihan envisioned to help attain
equality for blacks would not come easily. His strategy to generate
the political will for change was to upbraid American society
for the extraordinary cruelty of racial oppression and to assert
that bigotry was destroying the black family.
In support of his thesis Moynihan presented data to show that
one-third of nonwhite children lived in broken homes, a growing
percentage of nonwhite families were headed by females, and the
illegitimacy ratio for nonwhites was eight times the white ratio.
Unfortunately, this last statistic gave the impression to some
that the black community was suffering from rampant licentiousness.
Of course, that was not Moynihan’s intention. Even 40 years
ago “family values” was an important political issue.
His objective was to characterize the “moral decay”
of the black family as the fault of whites. He asserted that the
destruction of the family was “…a fearful price for
the incredible mistreatment to which it has been subjected over
the past three centuries.” Nonetheless, many black leaders
were ethnically embarrassed by the data which suggested that blacks
were immoral.
Without the support of the black leadership the Johnson-Moynihan
strategy foundered. The violent assault by the police on unarmed
civil rights marchers at the Edmund Pettis Bridge on March 7 generated
some support for black equality. It enabled President Johnson
to sign the Voting Rights Act on August 6.
In his speech, “to fulfill these rights” on June 4
at Howard University, President Johnson said, “in far too
many ways American Negroes have been another nation: deprived
of freedom, crippled by hatred, the doors of opportunity closed
to hope.” He committed the Great Society programs of his
administration to changing the course of history. However, the
momentum for more change began to dwindle as Johnson became increasingly
embroiled in the Vietnam War.
One must wonder whether black leaders lost a unique opportunity
40 years ago.
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