50th Anniversary of The Moynihan Report

Fifty years ago, Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan published a report that warned of an impending crisis among blacks. In The Negro Family: The Case For National Action, Moynihan said that the rising rate of illegitimacy in the black community would have devastating social consequences.

The messenger of inconvenient facts was right.

In 1965, 25 percent of black children lived in female-headed households. Today, about 50 percent of black children live with only their mother. Three-quarters of black babies are born out of wedlock.

Without a biological father in the home to love and protect the child, and to model responsible manhood, the child faces a higher risk of dropping out of school, becoming pregnant out of wedlock (repeating the generational cycle), and entering the criminal justice system. (Most prisoners come from female-headed households.)

Children living with their married, biological parents are better off physically, emotionally, and financially than children who don’t. Children living with only their mothers face a higher risk of physical and sexual abuse from men the mother brings into the home.

Liberals pin the blame on “the legacy of slavery,” Jim Crow, and so-called institutional racism (as Moynihan did; he was a liberal, after all), but people make their own decisions, and they’re accountable for their own actions.

What was the national action Moynihan called for? “In a word,” he wrote, “a national effort towards the problems of Negro Americans must be directed towards the question of family structure. The object should be to strengthen the Negro family so as to enable it to raise and support its members as do other families. After that, how this group of Americans chooses to run its affairs, take advantage of its opportunities, or fail to do so, is none of the nation’s business.”

The federal government had already expanded welfare and essentially became “Daddy” in the home. And if the government is paying for your food and shelter, it stays in your business. That’s one of the reasons why freedom-loving Americans hate the idea of socialized medicine.

The consequences of family instability are all around us. One example is the high rate of crime among blacks. Thirteen percent of the U.S. population, blacks commit over half the country’s violent crimes. This is alarming. Yet, mainstream media chooses to focus on a police officer killing a black man resisting arrest and rioters burning down businesses and terrorizing people in the name of “Black lives matter.”

Featured image credit: 72 Percent documentary