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Burrowing through masses of data, he isolated one factor—family background—linking poverty and poor performance on the induction tests. Cen tral to both was the Negro. Fewer than half of all Negroes reached the age of 18 having lived all of their lives with both parents; 21% of Negro families were fatherless; at least 25%, and maybe as many as 40%, of Negro children were illegitimate.
Journalists, clergymen and social workers had said some of the same things before, but never under the federal imprimatur. In the circumstances, the conclusions were shattering. Said the report: "The evidence—not final, but powerfully persuasive—is that the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling. For vast numbers, the fabric of conventional social relationships has all but disintegrated."
Decent Liberal. Some eloquent and sympathetic passages from the report that were incorporated into President Johnson's famous Howard University address in June 1965, won universal applause. But in the weeks that followed, civil rights leaders became increasingly disturbed by blunter items from the report that leaked into newspapers and magazines. Many of the stories emphasized the report's sensational findings about the family, often overlooking Moynihan's analysis of the causes, notably centuries of discrimination and economic deprivation.
When the full report was released, many Negro leaders and white liberals were primed to pounce on it as an attack on the Negro family itself. Among other things, Moynihan was called a racist and accused of having given encouragement to segregationists. By the time a White House planning session on Negro problems convened in November, both Moynihan and his report were anathema. "There is a certain kind of decent liberal mind," he reflected later, "which feels any criticism of liberal programs is illiberal, because everything is so precarious that any criticism is just going to give the enemy ammunition. That's not the way to make things work. We have to call things as we see them."
A Girl Like Diahann. Moynihan does that with a vehemence and a candor that earn him enemies. Like the 19th century Irish immigrants, he says, "the harsh fact is that as a group, at the present time," America's Negroes "are not equal to most of those groups with which they will be competing." Eventually, the Irish closed that gap, and Moynihan has no doubt that the Negroes will too. But they need help.
One major key, of course, is education, and Moynihan endorses any program that will improve schooling for Negroes—whether by means of bussing, where it is politically or physically feasible, or, where it is not, by "compensatory education" that upgrades ghetto schools.