thumb|[[Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1969]]

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 most orthodox setting, the US Department of Labor, to establish at some level of statistical conciseness what 'everyone knew': that economic conditions determine social conditions. Whereupon, it turned out that what everyone knew was evidently not so." The Moynihan Report asserted that the high rate of families headed by single mothers would greatly hinder progress of Blacks toward economic and political equality. The report was criticized by liberals at the time of publication, and its conclusions remain controversial.

Background

While writing The Negro Family: The Case For National Action, Moynihan was employed in a political appointee position at the US Department of Labor. He had been hired to help develop policy for the Johnson administration in its War on Poverty. In the course of analyzing statistics related to Black poverty, Moynihan noticed something unusual: Rates of Black male unemployment and welfare enrollment, instead of running parallel as they always had, started to diverge in 1962 in a way that would come to be called "Moynihan's scissors."

When Moynihan published the report in March 1965, the out-of-wedlock birthrate among Blacks was 25 percent, much higher than that of whites.

Contents

In the report's preface, Moynihan writes: