On the 50th anniversary of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous report on the breakdown of the black family in urban ghettos, Baltimore has descended into the tragic violence and chaos he predicted. In a report titled, “The Negro Family: The Case for Action,” Assistant Secretary of Labor Moynihan, warned that the deterioration of the black family, would result in soaring crime rates if it continued unchecked.
In the most famous passage of the 1965 report, Moynihan, who would later become a Democratic U.S. senator, wrote, “From the wild Irish slums of the 19th-century Eastern seaboard, to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there 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.”
When he wrote these words, the illegitimacy rate among African-Americans was 25 percent while illegitimacy nationwide, stood at 7.7 percent. In the mid-1960s thanks largely to Great Society welfare policies, the out-of-wedlock birth rate began to climb rapidly. Today the out-of-wedlock rate for blacks is over 72 percent with even higher rates in inner cities. Illegitimacy among Hispanics is now over 50 percent, and for whites it has risen from the 3 percent in 1960 to 36 percent today.
Moynihan’s words were prophetic. As family structure virtually disintegrated, Baltimore’s core has become a center of poverty and violence. Recent unchecked rioting in Baltimore has been followed by a crime spree with 32 people shot and nine killed just over the Memorial Day weekend.
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Man, he was right on the money.
ReplyDeleteThat's exactly what has happened.
Moynihan was a Democrat, ordinarily I did not vote for him but usually voted for the Republican challenger. But that being said, everybody, and I mean everybody, respected his intellect. He was a serious candidate.
ReplyDeleteThat is how Democrats were back then – they were very smart and thoughtful, but as a Republican we did have different ideas.
So we disagreed on many policies but still could respect one another.
WHAT THE HELL has happened to our political parties today.
What a stupid article.
ReplyDeleteTwo women can raise a young black kid just fine.
Always trying to act like there is something wrong with the new world order. Two women can actually do a much better job raising kids than a dumb man and a woman.
Why does everybody think children need fathers? It is old fashioned and gender biased thinking.
You're an IDIOT!
DeleteThere are more men in prison. Only a man can teach a boy how to be a man. Momma's teach their sons that it is cute to dress up in momma's shoes, dresses and hats. Due to fatherless boys, today's men lack masculinity. Yo feminine and pinkish.
Delete