The Other Half of the Moynihan Report

Memorandum for the President

The attached Memorandum is nine pages of dynamite about the Negro situation.

It was prepared by Pat Moynihan as a Memorandum to you from me.

I agree with Pat’s analysis and concur in his recommendations.

But if this were to be a formal Memorandum it would have to be put in different form. I think you will want to get the full impact of Pat’s more vigorous approach. So I am transmitting it this way. We can prepare something else later in the light of your reactions.

The key points in the Memorandum are these:

Memorandum for the President

On every hand there are unmistakable signs that the civil rights movement is entering a second stage, and a new crisis.

In the first stage Negro Americans fought for and won rights which are traditionally associated with Liberty:

In the second stage of the civil rights movement, the Negroes are clearly going to begin demanding rights that are associated with the democratic ideal of Equality:

These are, in effect, demands for equal results from equal competition.

America has never been comfortable with this type of demand. Movements for equality of results are often fiercely resisted: witness the initial hostility to the Populist movement, or to the Trade Union movement.

In the second stage of the civil rights movement, therefore, Negro organizations will lose much of their middle-class support. They in turn will become more bitter at what they already term “phoney liberals.”

More seriously, the entire nation, Negroes included will run smack into the fact that equal opportunity for Negroes does not produce equal results—because the Negroes today are a grievously injured people who in fair and equal competition will by and large lost out.

Many persons mistakenly compare discrimination against Negroes with past discrimination against other groups.

As if, for example, breaking down barriers to Negro apprentices in the buildings trades was like breaking down the quotas on Jewish students in medical schools a generation ago. It is not. Once the bars were down the Jewish lads swarmed in to the schools and were more than equal to the competition of their fellow students.

We have been in the business of breaking down job barriers to Negroes for four years now. We can no longer deny that our hardest task is not to create openings, but to fill them.

This problem is now compounded by a biological explosion. When you became Vice President one of every ten Americans was a Negro. Before 1972 the proportion will be one in eight.

In the next five years the Negro work force will expand 20 percent. Twice the rate of the whites.

Many of these young persons pouring into the labor force are simply not going to be prepared to compete.

There is one dramatic measure of their disabilities: 56 percent of the Negro youth called up for Selective Service fail the mental test. That is a test of ability at about the seventh-eighth grade level. 14 percent of whites fail it.

Little wonder 22 percent of Negro male teenagers are unemployed today.

How come?

Many explanations are put forward. In the Department of Labor, however, we feel that the master problem is that the Negro family structure is crumbling.

Somehow American national policy (quite the opposite is the case in Europe) has never given serious attention to the role of family structure in social problems. Yet everyone knows from personal experience how fundamental it is.

You were born poor. You were brought up poor. Yet you came of age full of ambition, energy, and ability. Because your mother and father gave it to you. The richest inheritance any child can have is a stable, loving, disciplined family life.

A quarter of the Negro children born in America last year were illegitimate.

The white illegitimacy rate is 3 percent.

Almost one-fourth of nonwhite families are headed by a woman. 36 percent of Negro children are living in families with one or both parents missing.

56 percent of Negro youth sooner or later on, receive Aid to Families of Dependent Children payments provided by the Federal government. As against 8 percent of whites.

Probably not much more than a third of Negro youth reach 18 having lived all their lives with both parents.

Because many middle-class Negro families are doing very well indeed, these overall statistics probably conceal the degree of disorganization among the families of the Negro poor.

Without exception every statistical measure of Negro family stability has gotten worse, not better, over the past fifteen years.

The main reason for this is the systematic weakening of the position of the Negro male. This problem is as old as America and as new as the April unemployment rate.

By contrast Negro women have always done and continue to do relatively well. There are, for example, more Negro women college graduates than male. In relative terms Negro women get better jobs, higher salaries, more prestige.

There is such evidence that these problems are beginning to feed on themselves -- that matters are getting worse at an evermore rapid rate.

The Department of Labor has always felt unemployment was a key problem -- and it was. Up until the last few years the number of broken Negro families, new welfare cases, and suchlike rose and fell with the Negro male unemployment rate as if they were connected by a chain. But in the past few years this connection seems to have been broken. Unemployment has dropped. But broken homes, illegitimacy, welfare dependency continue to rise.

Make no mistake. This is the problem that is making our cities ungovernable. It is the problem of poverty. It will not go away. By the middle of the 1980’s seven of the ten largest cities in America will probably have Negro majorities.

The breakdown of the Negro family is the principal cause of all the problem of delinquency, crime, school dropouts, unemployment, and poverty which are bankrupting our cities, and could very easily lead to a kind of political anarchy unlike anything we have known.

The point is this: Most of the welfare assistance, the special education efforts, the community action programs which we are now doubling and redoubling are essentially the provision of surrogate family services. Society is trying to do for these young persons what in normal circumstances parents do for their children. Only these children have no parents.

We can go on providing this kind of welfare assistance forever. The evidence of a quarter-century is that it does not change anything.

Or the Federal government can make an historic new departure. It can make the decision that an object of national policy is to bring the structure of the Negro family into line with that of the rest of our society.

I am convinced that if this is done we will solve the Negro for problem once and all. It is the work of a half-century. More is the reason to begin now. More is the reason to define our program in terms of the dynamic factors which at present work against equality, but can work for it.

How can this be done?

I am convinced that the first step must be to bring all the persons and agencies in the Government concerned with this problem to the point where they are aware of the problem of the Negro family, and agree that our basic strategy must be to strengthen it.

We have a tendency to rush off after solutions before really agreeing on what the problem is.

Once we agree on the problem, I believe we will find it relatively easy to come up with sound proposals for action. Of great importance, we will have an absolute measure of whether or not our efforts are producing any results. This is not the least advantage of adopting a family structure strategy.-- we will not be able to tell ourselves that we have changed anything until we really have.

As a start, I would suggest seven steps.