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Moynihan himself is a historian by training (Ph.D., Tufts, '61), sociologist by bent, politician by inclination, and intellectual gadfly by design. He stirred a furor that has not yet subsided with a 1965 report on the disintegration of the Negro family. When he turned 40 last March, his Cambridge staff placed an array of hats on his desk with the note: "To the only man we know who could wear them all so well."
New Keys. In seeking solutions for the embattled cities, the urbanologists would agree with Architect Philip Johnson that "there is no little key that opens all the doors." In city after city, coping with problem upon problem, they have, however, forged a few new keys and opened some important doors.
Baltimore and Hartford, Conn., include in their city-planning organizations not only the engineers and architects of old, but sociologists and architectural historians as well. New Haven, Conn., under the farsighted command of Mayor Richard C. Lee, has leaned heavily on the ideas of top urbanologists to organize community schools, revitalize a dying downtown area and yet preserve as much as possible of the old neighborhoods' historical character. Detroit, under Mayor Jerome P. Cavanagh, has created a "Human Resources Development" program, budgeted at $27 million this year, to provide adult and youth employment centers, medical clinics, neighborhood youth corps, and to aid small-business development in poor areas.
Skin-Close. The solution that is most urgently needed has so far eluded everybody, and until it is found, the cities will teeter on the brink of violence. That alchemical formula, of course, is the one that would transmute the ghettos from hostile enclaves—impoverished, ugly, seething with resentment—into integral, integrated parts of the cities. "For the present," says James Q. Wilson, Moynihan's predecessor at the Joint Center and now his right-hand man, "the urban Negro is, in a fundamental sense, the urban problem."
The nation's 22 million Negroes constitute only 11% of the U.S. population—but make up something like 20% of the inner cities. Between 1950 and 1966, some 5,200,000 of them, most from the rural South, moved to the cities. Today, 63% of Washington's population is Negro, followed by Newark (55%), Baltimore (41%), St. Louis (37%), and Philadelphia and Chicago (30% each). For the great mass of these Negroes, poverty or near poverty seems as much a part of their condition as the color of their skin.
The Negro Family. It is a problem that deeply fascinates the author of the still controversial "Moynihan Report" on the Negro family. Reading the Washington Post one day in 1963, Moynihan, then special assistant to the Secretary of Labor, was drawn to a three-inch story: 50% of the young men who had recently been called for armed forces preinduction tests had failed either the physical or mental examinations. Moynihan decided to follow the well-known statistic to its source.