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621 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 6 (2009)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0621 and id is 1 raw text is: INTRODUCTION Moynihan Redux: Legacies and Lessons BY DOUGLAS S. MASSEY and ROBERT J. SAMPSON Keywords: Daniel Patrick Moynihan; The Negro Family; poverty; race; employment; incar- ceration; family structure The Moynihan Report is probably the most famous piece of social scientific analysis never published. Completed in March 1965 as an inter- nal document by a young assistant secretary of labor, it was written as input into an ongoing debate within the administration of President Lyndon Baines Johnson about how to move for- ward in grappling with the Negro problem in the wake of the landmark passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The report argued that ending legal segregation in the South was not enough and that black poverty was more intractable than white poverty owing to the legacy of slavery and the persistence of discrimination and segregation throughout the country. These factors combined to put unique pressure on the black family, which was buckling under the strain in ways that ampli- fied the effects of other social problems and led to a tangle of pathology that perpetuated black poverty over time and across the generations. The purpose of the report was to make an impassioned moral case for a massive federal intervention to break the cycle of black poverty and put African Americans on the road to socioe- conomic achievement and integration into American society. Moynihan was never shy about using vivid prose to make his points, especially in private, and in his report, he was in full flower, by remarking that race relations were in a state of crisis and referring to the rising share of NOTE: The articles in this volume are based on presen- tations given at a conference held at Harvard University in September 2007, sponsored by the American Academy of Political and Social Science; the Department of Sociology, Harvard University; and the W E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, Harvard University. Podcasts from the conference are available at conference.aapss.org. DOI: 10.1177/0002716208325122 ANNALS, AAPSS, 621, January 2009 6

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