The Negro Family By Daniel Patrick Moynihan Summary

In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan served as the Assistant Secretary of Labor under President Lyndon B Johnson. Moynihan authored a report entitled The Negro Family: The Case For National Action, which claimed that “African Americans are free in a legal sense, but many social mechanisms perpetuate their subordinate social position”. According to Moynihan, the major “social mechanism” that barred black people from achieving economic equality was the increasing number of fragmented black families. His remedies for economic equality became the basis for Pres. Johnson’s “War on Poverty” and his notions about black families heavily influenced the way American society viewed poor black communities for years to come. Coupled with the 1965 Watts Riots in Los Angeles, California, the imagery of the virulent, fatherless black ghettos impacted the decisions of policy-makers and the nation at large.
Meanwhile Rev. Leon H. Sullivan’s historical success in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, reclaimed quietly disputed this image. Rev. Sullivan became heavily involved with “economic justice issues for African American workers” and “the expansion of black business enterprises”. He created a job training program that would spread across the country (Opportunities Industrialization Center) and spearheaded a number of other community development projects. The …show more content…
The strengths and weaknesses of the War of Poverty will be discussed as well. I will also attempt to parallel this narrative and its economic reverberations against the reality of the economic state of black communities, namely Rev. Sullivan’s economic agenda in his own community. Highlighting the expansion of these policies and ideas, I will incorporate Rev. King’s goal shift towards economic justice as