WASHINGTON — Many of the same social problems highlighted in a landmark 1965 study on black family structure have only worsened over the last 48 years and are now causing similar hardship for white and Hispanic families.
That’s a major finding of a new report by the Urban Institute, a liberal think tank, which re-examines the circumstances of black families nearly five decades after former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan authored the controversial report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.”
Moynihan was an assistant secretary in the Department of Labor in the 1960s when his report cited the breakdown of the nuclear family as the main cause of problems in the black community.
The so-called Moynihan Report looked at societal disparities between white and black families and the need for government action to address them. It focused on high rates of unemployment, crime, poverty, unwed parenting and other social ills that formed a “tangle of pathologies” that steered many black families into a continuing cycle of poor education, limited job prospects and dysfunctional long-term poverty.
