The Moynihan Report after Fifty Years: the Controversy and its Legacy

Event Details

On the 50th anniversary of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s controversial study, The Negro Family: A Case for National Action, the Miller Center’s Great Issues program will explore the report and its ongoing legacy for debates about race and economic inequality in the United States. Although conceived by Moynihan as an attempt to probe connections between racial inequality, economic injustice, and family structure, the report touched off a heated debate over its contention that households headed by single mothers constrained African American social and economic progress. The debate over the Moynihan report remains relevant today, as political leaders ranging from Paul Ryan to Barack Obama have recently referred to the report and its conclusions. On October 19, Daniel Geary and Daryl Scott, two leading scholars, will examine this debate, its history, and its implications for discussions of race today.

This event is open to the public. No RSVP is required.

Daniel Geary is the Mark Pigott Assistant Professor of U.S. History at Trinity College Dublin. He is the author of Radical Ambition: C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought and, most recently, of Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy, published in 2015 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. Geary is a graduate of the University of Virginia, and earned his Ph.D. at the University of California-Berkeley.

Daryl Scott is professor of history at Howard University. He is the author of Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880-1996, which won the Organization of American Historian's 1998 James Rawley Prize for the best work in race relations. He is the president of the Association for the Study of African American History (ASALH), and is also the founder of the ASALH Press as well as the editor and founder of The Woodson Review and Fire!!!:The Multimedia Journal of Black Studies. Scott earned his Ph.D. at Stanford University, and is a former fellow of the Carter G. Woodson Institute at UVA.