A conversation on race, nearly 50 years after Moynihan report

With President Obama calling for a national conversation about race following the Trayvon Martin verdict, it’s a shame we no longer have Daniel Patrick Moynihan with us. After all, it was he who started that conversation nearly 50 years ago, only to be denounced, not by racists and bigots, but by fellow liberals and the media for the facts it contained and the truths it told. The report, which Moynihan wrote as a 39-year-old assistant secretary of labor in the Johnson Administration, was titled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, but it remains known to this day as The Moynihan Report. Had some of the issues he raised been pursued, we might have not needed a president to call for a conversation to begin 50 years later.Moynihan saw his report as a starting point, but it wasn’t seen that way by a liberal establishment that had come to focus upon the civil rights issues fomented by southern segregation and the atrocities it inspired. It preferred not to see some of the problems in northern black America and its cities at a time black children in the South were being murdered in church bombings and dogs were turned on black Americans wanting to vote.Moynihan saw, regardless of locale, the deterioration of the black family as a major problem, tracing it back to a culture that discouraged family life among its slaves. “The deterioration of the Negro family,” he wrote, was “at the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society.” Moynihan cited census reports showing the percentage of black children born to unmarried women at more than 23 percent, while the percentage among whites was 3 percent. He predicted a steady increase as these children and their children were born into households in which they would suffer from poverty and a host of behavioral problems that damaged their lives. • • •I wonder if Moynihan could have known how right he was about that, but not only in black families. As of 2010, the percentage of out-of-wedlock births had grown to 25 percent — among whites. For black births, it reached 73 percent. Moynihan’s vision inspired a historic speech by President Lyndon Johnson at Howard University in 1965 in which the president acknowledged that while African-Americans had made great strides toward freedom, “freedom is not enough.”“You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: now you are free to go where you want...You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and then say, you are free to compete with all the others,” said the president.But the timing of the report was bad. Its release and the beginnings of its misinterpretation came as the Watts riots broke out in Los Angeles and Moynihan’s findings about “a tangle of pathology” in the black ghettos were linked to the riots. His reporting on the black family, especially, was considered insulting by the more militant civil rights movement. His description of the consequences of black children being raised in poverty in fatherless homes was famously described as “blaming the victim,” a bogus charge that remains alive and well today. • • •It was echoed just last week in the New Haven mayoral race when candidate Henry Fernandez, the former city economic development director, suggested there was too much crime among the residents of his Fair Haven neighborhood. He said he and his wife have to shield their 8-year-old son from drug dealing and prostitution. “I have to explain to him about syringes and drug paraphernalia and even used condoms on the street.”He was immediately attacked by the front runner, State Sen. Toni Harp, for insulting “the plenty of hard-working, caring residents of Fair Haven. That is not how we should describe the neighborhood.” She was joined by three aldermen from the area who are her supporters, including one who said, incredibly, “our problems should not be a reason to run for mayor.”And there’s still some media denial. When conservative columnist George Will, while discussing the collapse of Detroit, noted 79 percent of the city’s babies are born out of wedlock and 49 percent of fourth graders can’t read, Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor of The Nation, said citing the statistics was “an insult to the people of Detroit.” If the Obama conversation doesn’t produce and face all the issues squarely, another president will be calling for a conversation on race 50 years from now. Simsbury resident Dick Ahles is a retired journalist. Email him at dahles@hotmail.com.