From a 2006 article:
"
But good news like that had been a long time in coming. The link between family breakdown and poverty had been noticed much earlier than the 1990s. In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then Assistant Secretary of Labor, published a report that noticed a disturbing trend in the black community in America. Despite desegregation and efforts to ensure equal opportunity, welfare dependence was on the rise among blacks. Moynihan and his fellow researchers pointed to the disintegration of family as a major cause. But as with many prophets, his message was not very welcome at the time and went largely unheeded. Here is a paragraph of warning from the Moynihan Report:
Indices of dollars of income, standards of living, and years of education deceive. The fundamental problem is that of family structure. The evidence 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. So long as this situation persists, the cycle of poverty and disadvantage will continue to repeat itself.[1]"
Those words, regrettably, have proved all too true. When the Moynihan Report was released, one out of four black children was born to an unwed mother. Forty years later, two out of three black children are born outside of marriage.
www.heritage.org/poverty-and-i...e-welfare-dependence
Later, Patrick Moynihan would become senator Moynihan and strike the same clarion call, which seems prescient today. The Democrats rewarded him with cries of racist. The same old refuge of cornered Democrats. Tell an inconvenient truth and they will call you a racist or fascist. Patrick Moynihan, the second most intelligent man to hold office in the Senate. Thomas Jefferson being the most intelligent.