Family Breakdown and Poverty: To Flourish, Our Nation Must Face Some Hard Truths

In this article the authors call attention to the 1965 report, "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action," published by then Assistant Secretary to the Labor Department, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Fifty years later, these authors suggest that, in retrospect, Moynihan understood that the emerging pattern he noted was troubling above all not for economic reasons, but for deeper and more significant reasons "that of family structure--the Negro family in the urban ghettos was crumbling." The family appeared to be breaking down among lower-income Black Americans, and, to Moynihan, broken families meant broken communities and broken lives. Both elements of that diagnosis were crucial, and both were hard pills to swallow. Moynihan's report offers a model of truth telling--that broken families are becoming not the exception, but the rule, and its most vulnerable members, will be profoundly endangered. According to these authors, this is precisely what is now happening across wide swaths of American society.