https://www.frontpagemag.com/white-ethnic-flight-from-americas-cities/
In 1965, then undersecretary of labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan foresaw a problem that was about to undo the promise of Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I have a dream” speech, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and his boss Lyndon Jonson’s 1965 launch of the “Great Society.”
In reading her dissenting opinion last week on the affirmative action case before the Supreme Court, I got the distinct impression that Justice Sonia Sotomayor never read Moynihan’s The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, likely never heard of it, and certainly had no idea of how prescient it would prove to be.
Despite the “full recognition of their civil rights,” argued Moynihan, black Americans were growing increasingly discontent. They were expecting that equal opportunities would “produce roughly equal results, as compared with other groups,” but, added Moynihan, “This is not going to happen.” Nor did he think it ever would happen “unless a new and special effort is made.”
Nearly sixty years later Moynihan’s warning seems all the more prophetic. Herculean efforts have been made over the years to achieve “equal results,” but none has addressed the core issue. Wrote Moynihan:
The fundamental problem, in which this is most clearly the case, is that of family structure. The evidence— not final, but powerfully persuasive—is that the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling. A middle class group has managed to save itself, but for vast numbers of the unskilled, poorly educated city working class the fabric of conventional social relationships has all but disintegrated.
In a Father’s Day speech in 2008 then candidate Barack Obama affirmed Moynihan’s worst fears. “Of all the rocks upon which we build our lives, we are reminded today that family is the most important,” Obama told the congregation at a Chicago church.
Here, Obama spoke with a candor not heard since Lyndon Johnson threw Moynihan under the bus. “But if we are honest with ourselves,” he continued, “we’ll admit that what too many fathers also are is missing—missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.”
