The Negro Family: The Case For National Action

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The Negro Family: The Case For National Action, also known as the Moynihan Report, named after U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the author of the controversial report, which was released in 1965. It hypothesized that the destruction of the Black nuclear-family structure would hinder further progress towards economic, and thus political, equality.

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The report concluded that the structure of family life in the black community constituted a 'tangle of pathology...capable of perpetuating itself without assistance from the white world,' and that 'at the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family. It is the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community at the present time.' Further, the report argued that the matriarchal structure of black culture weakened the ability of black men to function as authority figures. This particular notion of black familial life has become a widespread, if not dominant, paradigm for comprehending the social and economic disintegration of late twentieth-century black urban life. (pp.218-219)