The Negro Family: The Case For National Action

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The Negro Family: The Case For National Action, commonly known as the Moynihan Report, was a 1965 report on Black poverty in the United States written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an American scholar serving as Assistant Secretary of Labor under President Lyndon B. Johnson, and a future US Senator from New York. Moynihan argued that the rise in black single-mother families was caused not by a lack of jobs for men, but by a destructive vein in ghetto culture, which could be traced back to the slavery era and the subsequent racial discrimination in the American South under Jim Crow laws. In the 1930s, Black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier initiated what would become the mainstream view that economic and social conditions had shaped Negro family characteristics. Moynihan was considered one of the first academicians to challenge conventional social-science wisdom about the roots of persistent African-American poverty and its connection to family life. As he later wrote, "The work began in the...

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