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Many say the 1965 report predicted the implosion of the black family. Sociologist Herbert Gans disagrees.
The oft-repeated tropes about the breakdown of the black family can be traced, in large part, to a 1965 Department of Labor report called The Negro Family: A Case for National Action, also known as the Moynihan Report. With then-Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan as the principal author, the report tied the decline of the nuclear family within the black community social pathology, increasing welfare dependency and chronic poverty. Sociologist Herbert Gans offers a critique of The Moynihan Report in the Fall 2011 issue of the Du Bois Review.
According to the abstract, “The Moynihan Report of 1965 will soon be fifty years old, and some social scientists now venerate it as a sterling application of social science data and analysis by the federal government. This author, who was directly involved in events connected with the release of the Report, does not agree; this article examines the shortcomings of the Report.”
Below is an excerpt of Gans’ analysis:

Moynihan’s initial knowledge of research about the Black community appears to have come from the work of Nathan Glazer (1963), who had begun his own discussion of the Negro family in Beyond the Melting Pot with observations on the female-headed family, illegitimacy, child abandonment, and related problems. For his observations on the harshness of American slavery, Moynihan drew from Glazer’s (1963) recently written introduction to Stanley Elkins’ Slavery. Beyond that, the Report included only brief quotations from the work of Franklin Frazier, Kenneth Clark, Thomas Pettigrew, Margaret Mead, and a few other social scientists.
In later years, some of Moynihan’s writing appeared in academic books and journals, and he came to know and work with many important social scientists. Still, in 2000 his biographer and friend, Godfrey Hodgson, wrote: “He thinks anecdotally.

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