The moynihan report

The Negro Family: The Case for National Action , completed in March, , became one of the most controversial documents of the twentieth century. Moynihan wrote the report on his own initiative hoping to persuade White House officials that civil-rights legislation alone would not produce racial equality. However, the Johnson administration quickly disowned the Moynihan Report when it sparked heated debate after becoming public in August, Distracted by the Vietnam War, Johnson never followed up his stirring rhetoric at Howard with significant new policies.

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.

The Moynihan Report is a historical artifact best understood in the context of its time.

Moynihan report pdf

Yet it remains relevant today amidst current discussion of why racial inequality persists despite the passage of civil-rights legislation. 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. To aid readers interested in exploring the report and the issues it raises, The Atlantic is publishing this annotated copy of The Negro Family.

The United States is approaching a new crisis in race relations.

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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 The Civil Rights Act of 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.