The Negro Family: The Case For National Action, commonly known as the Moynihan Report, was a 1965 report on black poverty in the United States written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an American scholar serving as Assistant Secretary of Labor under President Lyndon B. Johnson and later to become a US Senator. Moynihan argued that the rise in black single-mother families was caused not by a lack of jobs, but by a destructive vein in ghetto culture, which could be traced to slavery times and continued discrimination in the American South under Jim Crow. Black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier had introduced that idea in the 1930s, but Moynihan was considered one of the first academics to defy conventional social-science wisdom about the structure of poverty. As he wrote later, "The work began in the most orthodox setting, the US Department of Labor, to establish at some level of statistical conciseness what 'everyone knew': that economic conditions determine social conditions. Whereupon, it turned out that what everyone knew was evidently not so." The report concluded that the high rate of families headed by single mothers would greatly hinder progress of blacks toward economic and political equality. The Moynihan Report was criticized by liberals at the time of publication, and its conclusions remain controversial. Background While writing The Negro Family: The Case For National Action, Moynihan was employed in a political appointee position at the US Department of Labor, hired to help develop policy for the Johnson administration in its War on Poverty. In the course of analyzing statistics related to black poverty, Moynihan noticed something unusual: Rates of black male unemployment and welfare enrollment, instead of running parallel as they always had, started to diverge in 1962 in a way that would come to be called "Moynihan's scissors." When Moynihan published his report in 1965, the out-of-wedlock birthrate among blacks was 25 percent, much higher than that of whites. Contents In the introduction to his report, Moynihan said that "the gap between the Negro and most other groups in American society is widening." He also said that the collapse of the nuclear family in the black lower class would preserve the gap between possibilities for Negroes and other groups and favor other ethnic groups. He acknowledged the continued existence of racism and discrimination within society, despite the victories that blacks had won by civil rights legislation. Moynihan concluded, "The steady expansion of