Saving the Negro Family

[This article originally published in March, 2011]

In 1965, Patrick Moynihan, then an obscure Labor Department bureaucrat, wrote a report for President Lyndon Johnson called The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. It drew attention to the then-shocking rate of black illegitimacy — 25 percent — and described the “tangle of pathology” in which lower-class blacks seemed to be trapped.

What came to be known as the Moynihan Report caused a huge stir. It was the first and most famous of a series of investigations into the deterioration of the black family that has continued with varying degrees of urgency to the present day. In Freedom is Not Enough, historian James T. Patterson, emeritus of Brown University, describes the effects of the report, recounts the life of its author, summarizes various academic attempts to explain black illegitimacy, and describes the policies that were meant to reduce it. His book is also an unwitting account of the floundering that comes from an unwillingness to face the facts about race.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan was born in 1927 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but grew up in New York City. His father abandoned the family and he grew up poor. This gave him an abiding and undoubtedly genuine concern for children who grow up without fathers. He served in the Navy and eventually got bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Tufts. He was ambitious, a skilled flatterer, and had a knack for cultivating useful connections. He had a brief stint in the Nixon administration but was otherwise a life-long Democrat with a typically Democrat faith in the power and inclination of government to do good. Negro uplift was one of his pet projects.

Moynihan was not yet 40 when he became an assistant secretary of labor in the Johnson administration. He caught the president’s eye, and helped write the speech from which Prof. Patterson has taken the title of this book. It was the famous Howard University commencement speech of 1965, in which Johnson explained the need for racial preferences. For blacks, he explained, “freedom is not enough.” It was not fair to cut the chains that had bound the Negro for centuries, put him at the starting line of a race, and expect him to compete. Johnson called for “a more profound stage of the battle for civil rights” that would achieve “not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and as a result.”

Much more here