welfare programs can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States." More than 30 years later, S. Craig Watkins described Moynihan's conclusions: Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema (1998): The report concluded that the structure of family life in the black community constituted a 'tangle of pathology... capable of perpetuating itself without assistance from the white world,' and that 'at the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family. It is the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community at the present time.' Also, the report argued that the matriarchal structure of black culture weakened the ability of black men to function as authority figures. That particular notion of black familial life has become a widespread, if not dominant, paradigm for comprehending the social and economic disintegration of late 20th-century black urban life. Influence The Moynihan Report generated considerable controversy and has had long-lasting and important influence. Writing to Lyndon Johnson, Moynihan argued that without access to jobs and the means to contribute meaningful support to a family, black men would become systematically alienated from their roles as husbands and fathers, which would cause rates of divorce, child abandonment and out-of-wedlock births to skyrocket in the black community (a trend that had already begun by the mid-1960s), leading to vast increases in the numbers of households headed by females. Moynihan made a contemporaneous argument for programs for jobs, vocational training, and educational programs for the black community. Modern scholars of the 21st century, including Douglas Massey, believe that the report was one of the more influential in the construction of the War on Poverty. In 2009 historian Sam Tanenhaus wrote that Moynihan's fights with the New Left over the report were a signal that Great Society liberalism had political challengers both from the right and from the left. Reception and following debate From the time of its publication, the report has been sharply attacked by black and civil rights leaders as examples of white patronizing, cultural bias, or racism. At various times, the report has been condemned or dismissed by the NAACP and other civil rights groups and leaders such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Critics accused Moynihan of relying on stereotypes of the black family and black men, implying