From the wild Irish slums of the 19th-century Eastern seaboard to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, is one unmistakable lesson in American history: a community that allows large numbers of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future–that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder. . .are not only to be expected, they are very near to inevitable." - Daniel Moynihan-1965.
It's a statement that rings true today, just as it did forty years ago.
I think everyone should read the Moynihan Report. This document, known then as "The Negro Family: The Case For National Action," held that many of the problems of American blacks resulted from the instability of black urban families. The report was leaked to the media in July 1965, one month before the devastating riots in Watts, and called for more government action to improve the economic prospects of black families.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a sociologist and assistant secretary for policy planning and research at the Labor Department. He became a prominent U.S. Senator representing New York and later served as an adviser to President Richard Nixon.
Moynihan urged that the Federal Government adopt a national policy for the reconstruction of the black family. He laid out clear arguments, noting that the real cause of the troubles in the black community was not so much segregation or a lack of voting power. He recognized the structure of the Negro family was highly "unstable and in many urban centers…approaching complete breakdown."
Moynihan presciently revealed that African-American inequality is rooted primarily in family structure. He hoped to draw attention to the more profound social and economic inequities faced by African Americans, especially the absence of job opportunities for black men that prevented them from serving as family breadwinners. Moynihan meant for the report to serve as a call to action and planned social and political intervention.
Mr. Moynihan was ostracized for his findings with the release of this report. Critics came from all corners of society. Civil-rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis spoke out angrily against the account. Others said that it assumed that middle-class American values are the correct values for everyone in America. They suggested that he believed everyone should have a family structure like his own.
Although some of our government's most intrusive policies have changed over the years, and social progress has created several opportunities for people in many black communities, our country still struggles with many of the problems Moynihan identified back in 1965. Life hasn't been much easier for much of the black poor.
Five decades after Moynihan's work, white families exhibit the same rates of nonmarital childbearing and single parenting as black families did in the 1960s when Moynihan sounded his alarm. Meanwhile, the disintegration of the black nuclear family continued apace. Since the publication of the Moynihan Report, the proportion of African American children born outside of marriage has ballooned from 24 percent to 70 percent.
The decline of traditional families across racial and ethnic groups indicates that factors driving the decline do not lie solely within the black community but in the larger social and economic context. Nevertheless, the consequences of these trends in family structure may be felt disproportionately among blacks as their children are far more likely to be born into, and raised in father-absent families than are white children.
A report written by the Urban Institute called The Moynihan Report Revisited was published in 2013. In the report, the Urban Institute points out:
"Today, the share of white children born outside marriage is about the same as the share of black children born outside marriage in Moynihan's day." "The percentage of black children born to unmarried mothers, in comparison, tripled between the early 1960s and 2009, remaining far higher than the percentage of white children born to unmarried mothers."
One of the critical things to understand is how many strands are attached to this web of problems. We can choose not to address family stability or continue to throw money at the consequences of broken homes. There are more opportunities for black families today. The black middle class has grown, but the challenges that undermine sustained and widespread economic prosperity remain stubborn. Chief among those challenges is the disproportionate share of black children living in single-parent homes.
Although Moynihan was criticized in the academic world and beyond, subsequent events have proven him correct. The rate of unmarried births among whites today is considerably higher than the 1965 rate among blacks, which troubled Moynihan enough to issue his bombshell report. An estimated half of all children in the United States today live with a single mother at some point before they turn eighteen. This portends many different outcomes, few of them good.
Family is about security, power, and resources. Having more than one parent around increases all three. The outcomes of families with more than one parent far outstrip those of single-parent ones. We have years of studies that show kids who grow up in single-women-headed families don't fare well. They're more likely to do poorly in school, drop out, be arrested, and become single parents themselves. These factors reinforce the economic disadvantages children often face in these communities.
Racial and class inequality are again on the national agenda, just like when Moynihan wrote his report back in 1965. He was correct when he predicted how exposing so many black children, especially males, to fatherless families would prevent them from seizing new opportunities through the civil rights revolution. There are many other contributing factors, but blacks in America are still falling behind others in educational achievement, employment rates, and earnings because of the continuing demise of married-couple families.
Today, blacks also have much higher crime and incarceration rates. These facts have lead to a growing recognition that the promise of the civil rights revolution won't be achieved until the black family is repaired.
Clayton Craddock is a father, independent thinker, and the founder and publisher of the social and political commentary newsletter Think Things Through and host of the Think Things Through Podcast.
He's an alumnus of Howard University and is the drummer for the Broadway musical Ain't Too Proud - The Life and Times Of The Temptations.
Other musicals include: "Tick, tick…BOOM!, Altar Boyz, Memphis The Musical, and Lady Day At Emerson's Bar and Grill. Also, Clayton has worked on: Footloose, Motown, The Color Purple, Rent, Little Shop of Horrors, Spongebob Squarepants, The Musical, Evita, Cats, and Avenue Q.
Follow him on Instagram, Twitter or read more on his website: claytoncraddock.com
This is a good piece and it makes some important points. I would nitpick a couple of items. I would shy away from saying women-headed households and just prefer to single-parent households. I know that statistically most single parent households are run by women, but the main problem is that there's only one parent present and not that it is the mother and I don't think you intended to point to mothers. Also, I would want to see comparisons on a purely economic basis. How much of this is racial and how much of this is due to single-parent households that are also poor? I suspect, though I don't have any specific knowledge, that these problems exist in all poor families and if that is the case, then the prescriptive actions could be more broadly based and, possibly, gain broader support.
As I recall, in his later years MLK was focusing more on poverty and less on race. He knew what he was doing. By focusing on poverty without regard for race, he could broaden his support and by focusing on poverty, he could address many problems in the Black community.
I did not notice any mention of the factor of benefits eligibility, especially for public housing assistance. It is simply a fact that the welfare state in its current and longstanding configurations makes it far more likely for a single woman with children to qualify for just about any program than a married one, making single motherhood not just a social ill but a permanently incentivized advantage for the women, while reducing genuine and committed fatherhood under such circumstances to an administrative nuisance at best. At worst, even a father's presence in a government-issued home is an act of fraud. Which, of course, lends itself enthusiastically to a household model where the mother is the head of the household, and any male adult in the home is entirely subject to eviction and arrest at any time, on her say-so alone. Not much of a status for the menfolk, there. Try meeting with teachers and whatnot under such a presumed-guilt status, and just see the way everyone looks at such a man. I have, it isn't pretty.
In my brief time in the corrupt and opportunistic world of public housing, this was a laughably open secret. Any couples I knew to be involved in a 'self-help housing' program where applicants lend a hand in the construction of new homes for themselves and other group members, were made up of a woman applicant and an administratively nonexistent man, who did all her portion of the building labor in her place but also knew he might get kicked out of the very home he was helping to build as soon as Her Majesty moved into it.
As Clayton knows full well from the divorce-court arena, reducing the status of fatherhood to a servant's role at best is built right into the procedures and guidelines. The same goes for the public housing racket. And as he also knows from my obsessing on it to him for years now, the 1994 Violence Against Women Act is the template and funding engine of a mass system of grants and programs, in which the idea of the single-mother home is taken as a given, and even preferred, outcome. Since the man of the house is always the perpetrator and the mom and kids always his victims, so the mindset goes, the very concept of a 'family' simply assumes that having a grown man within it is inherently dangerous and best prevented in perpetuity. At least on paper.
And, as all government grant programs run on caseload numbers pasted into subsequent grant re-applications, and as VAWA-funded storefronts quite often offer housing assistance both temporary and long-term to female 'victims', and will only receive new grant funds for housing by showing high enough numbers of such housing already awarded, just do the arithmetic: the feminist-indoctrinated welfare state is in the business of intentionally eliminating men from homes and families, as a matter of both policy and the biased anti-male ideology underlying it.
Which, of course, leaves Herself in a position of unilateral authority in her home, with the inevitable parade of 'mom's boyfriends' and 'stepdads' entirely dependent on her goodwill to remain there. With the number of women who have described single-mother upbringings to me where a young teenage girl is abused with her mother's knowledge and even tacit consent, apparently to relieve the mom of any implicit sexual duties but still offering relief to a horny man, I have to wonder what kind of everyday nightmare public housing sets up for at least young girls to grow up in. I take it as a given that issuing public housing to a woman means that her children will be abused within it, and that this known quantity is completely ignored by the do-gooders and social-justice agitators, whose motives are more in the realm of continuing their grants eligibility, than in fixing any genuine social injustices.