The Moynihan Report: Examining Its Legacy 60 Years Later

By Ann Whitcher Gentzke

Sixty years after its release, the influential and controversial Moynihan Report of 1965 continues to reverberate in the nation’s social welfare policy to the detriment of those it was supposed to help—poor Black people, as opposed to all poor people in the U.S. This was the consensus view of panelists participating in “The Moynihan Report at 60: Impact and Reflection,” a symposium and training program presented by the School of Social Work’s Office of Continuing Education, Nov. 19, in Capen Hall.

The interdisciplinary panel, representing five UB schools, was moderated by Dean Keith A. Alford, who briefly traced the report’s history and outlined key points for discussion. The symposium was attended by more than 200 faculty, alumni and community members who participated in person in the Buffalo Room and online via Zoom.

“The Moynihan Report served as a document to define the Negro family,” Alford told those assembled. “Many would say that the definition of the family in the Moynihan Report did not fully convey the Black family’s experience. As we know, families come in all forms, playing a pivotal role in the child-rearing process. On the 60th anniversary, we will look at the report’s impact and engage in reflection. What has changed for the better or for the worse? Where can we see social work, for instance, and other applied professions, in reference to the impact of the report?”

To address these questions, Alford called on the invited panelists: Filomena Critelli, associate professor in the School of Social Work; Brittany Jones, assistant professor in the Graduate School of Education; David Milling, associate professor in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences; Athena Mutua, professor in the School of Law; and Henry Louis Taylor Jr., professor in the School of Architecture and Planning. Each panelist gave a statement reflecting on the report’s impact as the discussion ensued.

Authored by Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003), the former U.S. senator from New York who was then assistant secretary of labor in the Johnson Administration, the report gathered a slew of statistics to argue “the fundamental problem … is that of family structure.” When the report was leaked and discussed in a syndicated newspaper column, it exploded on the national scene, causing dismay among critics who feared it drew on stereotypes and reflected racist suppositions.

“One of the reasons why the Moynihan Report blew up in Moynihan’s face is the document was never meant for public perusal,” journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates said in a 2024 PBS clip shown at the beginning of the program. “It is written in a very bombastic way. It was written to get the attention of politicians.”

In fact, it got the attention of the nation and the world, Alford remarked before the panelists were introduced.

The Moynihan Report—officially “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action”—came at a critical point in U.S. history, said Critelli, associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion. “It was 1965 and the Civil Rights Movement had reached a pivotal moment. Lyndon Johnson was prepared to endorse the next and more profound stage in the battle for civil rights. … The War on Poverty was underway and with it came a significant expansion of the country’s social welfare system.”

At the time, many scholars determined that Moynihan’s main point was the concern about the number of women who were accessing public assistance under the program known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children. “Moynihan looked at this, I think, in a very narrow frame, and drew really broad conclusions from the data,” said Critelli. Moreover, the Moynihan Report reinforced racial stereotypes of the matriarch and “welfare mother,” while portraying female headed households as aberrant in some way, she added.

For her part, Jones, a former high school social studies teacher who worked in predominately Black school districts, said the report “institutionalized the belief that Black children’s struggles were rooted in their families, rather than in systemic racism.” Resulting harms included policy responses that “pathologize Black families rather than addressing school segregation, unequal funding, exclusionary discipline and curricular erasure.” Another lingering effect, Jones said, is the narrowed responsiveness of educators, who whether consciously or from some underlying belief, “absorb narratives and enact pedagogies that reflect dispositions of deficiency, rather than recognizing the brilliance, resilience and cultural wealth of Black communities.”

Milling, a primary care physician at ECMC, reflected on the report’s impact as it relates to the realities of treating patients, as well as larger socioeconomic issues the report mostly ignored. “What is it about the breakdown in the family that they thought was the root cause?” Milling asked. He noted that this “tangle of pathology”—the report’s actual wording in a chapter heading—“led to poverty, crime and welfare dependency that became so ingrained in the conversation that we are still dealing with the after effects of this 60 years later.”

Policy implications that were raised in the report to strengthen the Black family really didn’t help, he argued. “What we should have been doing was to really address structural barriers like employment, housing and education.”

As for maternal mortality, Milling noted that a Black woman living today, whether she has a graduate degree, is married or lives in the suburbs and has access to care, “it’s still a fact that she’s going to have worse outcomes than her white counterparts. … We’re going to have to continue to think about social and environmental factors related to poverty and income, education, housing and neighborhoods, environmental hazards, access to care, transportation and recreation facilities to help us to move the needle here. This is not just simply about marriage and a family unit.”

“The Moynihan Report was on to something in identifying the family structure as shaping behaviors … but it had a lot of the pieces wrong,” said Mutua, the Floyd H. & Hilda L. Hurst Faculty Scholar in the School of Law. “First of all, in terms of looking at parents, they have a role. Relatives have a really big role, and bigger roles than we might think. But ultimately, it is this idea of family causing inequality that is the tail wagging the dog.”

In Mutua’s view, the Moynihan Report also ignores the realities of what Stephen Menedian, research director of UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute, calls “structural racism” in his recent book of the same name. “Menedian says racial inequality is largely structured by our social arrangements, and that structural racism is the callous neglect to attend to that reality,” Mutua noted. “Menedian suggests that place and racial segregation inform the structure of opportunity in the United States, and that the metropolitan area, municipal policies and the neighborhood, along with things like economic segregation, social networks and the family, really structure opportunity in the United States.”

Taylor’s assessment of the 1965 document was blunt and unyielding: “If legally and constitutionally, Jim Crow had fallen and the nation’s racial discrimination abolished, why were Blacks still locked in the economic basement? The government called on Daniel Patrick Moynihan to answer this provocative question, and he responded by inventing the crisis of the Negro family and identifying its breakdown as the root cause of the ongoing concentration of Black people in that economic basement.” Taylor argued that the report was propaganda designed to hide the reality that Blacks were an oppressed and exploited people.

In a question-and-answer session that followed the individual presentations, panelists fielded questions from the moderator, as well as from in-person and online audience members. Responding to a question from Alford, Taylor noted that in the aftermath of the report, liberal scholars, including those from the Black community, went on “a wild goose chase,” looking at family issues and cultural deficits, rather than examining the structural deficiencies and economic conditions confronting the Black community. This phenomenon persists today, he said, and will continue unabated without a “radical transformation of U.S. capitalism” and neighborhood organizing, he said.

“How did Moynihan know what was going on in the Black community anyway?” Taylor asked, eliciting laughter from the audience and panel. “We have learned from our history is that we go inside of these neighborhoods, and we start organizing them around making the radical changes that we need. You will see people begin to change. You will see the world begin to change.”