The Moynihan Report: Revisiting the perception of Civil Rights progress in 1960s America
By Asha Ambasna, Second Year History Student
‘The Negro Family: The Case for National Action’, (also known as the Moynihan report) was published in 1965, emerging from a restless America at the peak of its struggle between achieving the ‘American Dream’ and facing the reality of the society that it had created. The report, written by sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Assistant Secretary of Labour under the Johnson administration, outlined arguments as to why ‘legislation alone would not produce racial equality’, and how stable family structure was crucial to enable opportunity and success for Black American families. It reveals an America in which racism was ingrained structurally, politically and financially, despite perceived civil rights progress.
The Moynihan report was set within a complex context, rising from an overarching history of racism that consumed America. Built upon a backdrop of false ideas of ‘black criminality’, eugenic theory, and pressures of assimilation and acculturation, racism was ingrained in the psyche of society. Running parallel to this, post war hopes and fears influenced new ideas of tolerance and brought civil rights into focus, as well as cold war pressure to close the gap between the majority and historically marginalised populations, a seemingly positive dawn of a ‘golden era in America’. The report emerges at the pinnacle of the clash of these two strands, directly after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965. It shows a distinct contrast to the conventional civil rights master narrative popularised by historians in the late 1970s, traditionally preoccupied with leaders and judicial successes, and provides an alternative insight into the reality of the continuation of oppression in America.
Moynihan argues that ‘only forceful government action’ could ‘break the cycle’ of structural issues within the Black American family, perpetuating the ‘Black underclass’. Moynihan identifies that there is a growing issue of decline in prosperity of Black American families in urban areas that needs to be addressed immediately and is being largely ignored by both the government and the wider public. It demonstrates that despite the traditional narrative of civil rights success, the achievement of the civil rights movements’ legislative objectives were not enough to ensure racial equality. The report argues that the ‘racist virus in the American bloodstream still afflicts us’, identifying the racism that remained untouched by the legislative progress of the civil rights movement. Moynihan argues that ‘three centuries of injustice… brought about deep-seated structural distortions in the life of the Negro American’, particularly regarding family structures. He described a ‘tangle of pathologies’, that would ‘create a self-perpetuating cycle of deprivation, hardship, and inequality’. This demonstrates that these areas of adversity had largely been ignored by the mainstream and required attention and ‘national action’ in order to limit further damage. He envisioned the ‘patriarchal family’ as being essential to the American dream, summarising that ‘male unemployment was the biggest impediment to the social mobility of the poor’.
A key dynamic in the process of oppression at the time was the ‘othering’ of Black Americans and people of colour. As Powell and Menendian suggest, ‘it is the institutionalization and structural features of othering that perhaps most explain group-based inequalities’, which supports the idea that racism would prevail, as Moynihan identified, with systems of oppression within sectors such as employment and housing still existing. Exemplifying this was the Kerner report, influenced heavily by Moynihan, discussing how the ghetto was created, maintained and condoned by white institutions and society. This distancing and alienation of Black Americans in the urban environment was perhaps masked by the legislative progress of the civil rights movement. Black Americans were still seen by many in the establishment as a ‘problem’ that needed to be solved, exemplifying the idea of structural othering. James Farmer stated ‘we are sick to death of being analysed, mesmerized, bought, sold and slobbered over…’ condemning the political analysis by the establishment, including Moynihan.
The Moynihan report provides a unique lens in which to assess society at the time, one preoccupied with attempting to acknowledge and mitigate destructive issues that America itself had created. Society in 1960s America was focused on reaching ‘The American Dream’, an abstract, elusive and exclusive vision. It can be said that it was the questioning of what this meant for all Americans that was the catalyst for not only the pushing of structural boundaries in society and culture, but also the backlash from those who were not ready to accept change. Although there were legislative successes in the fight against racism and oppression, it is clear through analysis of the Moynihan report that the movement beyond equality and into equity was harder to navigate due to the structural barriers in areas such as housing, family and employment that had not evolved at the pace of progressive views. These drives towards reform, although not always successful, built a legacy of challenging the establishment, and the Moynihan report has never been more relevant in examining othering, oppression and structural racism than in America today.
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Cover Image Credit: Unseen Histories on Unsplash