Office of Policy Planning and Research United States
Department of Labor
March 1965
Two hundred years ago, in 1765, nine assembled colonies first joined
together to demand freedom from arbitrary power.
For the first century we struggled to hold together the first
continental union of democracy in the history of man. One hundred years ago, in
1865, following a terrible test of blood and fire, the compact of union was
finally sealed.
For a second century we labored to establish a unity of purpose and
interest among the many groups which make up the American community.
That struggle has often brought pain and violence. It is not yet
over.
State of the Union Message of President Lyndon B. Johnson,
January 4, 1965.
The United States is approaching a new crisis in race relations.
In the decade that began with the school desegregation decision of the
Supreme Court, and ended with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the
demand of Negro Americans for full recognition of their civil rights was
finally met.
The effort, no matter how savage and brutal, of some State and local
governments to thwart the exercise of those rights is doomed. The nation will
not put up with it — least of all the Negroes. The present moment will pass.
In the meantime, a new period is beginning.
In this new period the expectations of the Negro Americans will go
beyond civil rights. Being Americans, they will now expect that in the near
future equal opportunities for them as a group will produce roughly equal
results, as compared with other groups. This is not going to happen. Nor will
it happen for generations to come unless a new and special effort is made.
There are two reasons. First, the racist virus in the American blood
stream still afflicts us: Negroes will encounter serious personal prejudice for
at least another generation. Second, three centuries of sometimes unimaginable
mistreatment have taken their toll on the Negro people. The harsh fact is that
as a group, at the present time, in terms of ability to win out in the
competitions of American life, they are not equal to most of those groups with
which they will be competing. Individually, Negro Americans reach the highest
peaks of achievement. But collectively, in the spectrum of American ethnic and
religious and regional groups, where some get plenty and some get none, where
some send eighty percent of their children to college and others pull them out
of school at the 8th grade, Negroes are among the weakest.
The most difficult fact for white Americans to understand is that in
these terms the circumstances of the Negro American community in recent years
has probably been getting worse, not better.
Indices of dollars of income, standards of living, and years of
education deceive. The gap between the Negro and most other groups in American
society is widening.
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. There are indications that the situation may have been
arrested in the past few years, but the general post war trend is unmistakable.
So long as this situation persists, the cycle of poverty and disadvantage will
continue to repeat itself.
The thesis of this paper is that these events, in combination, confront
the nation with a new kind of problem. Measures that have worked in the past,
or would work for most groups in the present, will not work here. A national
effort is required that will give a unity of purpose to the many activities of
the Federal government in this area, directed to a new kind of national goal:
the establishment of a stable Negro family structure.
This would be a new departure for Federal policy. And a difficult one.
But it almost certainly offers the only possibility of resolving in our time
what is, after all, the nation's oldest, and most intransigent, and now its
most dangerous social problem. What Gunnar Myrdal said in An American Dilemma
remains true today: "America is free to chose whether the Negro shall remain
her liability or become her opportunity."
Table of Contents
Chapter I. The Negro American
Revolution.
Chapter II. The Negro American
Family.
Chapter III. The Roots of the
Problem.
Chapter IV. The Tangle of Pathology.
Chapter V. The Case for National
Action.
Footnote References.
NOTE: The 1965 published version of this Report included numerous tables
and graphs, which are not reproduced electronically here at this time. Readers
who wish to use the graphics should be able to access a printed copy of the
Report at the nearest Federal Depository Library. Contact
GPO
Access for locations.
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