“From the wild Irish slums of the 19th-century Eastern seaboard, to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, is one unmistakable lesson in American history: a community that allows large numbers of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future–that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder. . .are not only to be expected, they are very near to inevitable.”

Daniel Moynihan-1965

It’s a statement that rings true today just as it did forty years ago.

I think everyone should be required to read the Moynihan Report. This document, known then as “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action,” is now referred to as the Moynihan Report. The report was leaked to the media in July 1965, one month before the devastating riots in Watts. Moynihan urged that the Federal Government adopt a national policy for the reconstruction of the black family. He laid out clear arguments, noting that the real cause of the troubles in the black community, was not so much segregation, or a lack of voting power, but the structure of the Negro family is highly “unstable and in many urban centers…approaching complete breakdown.”

Mr. Moynihan was ostracized for his findings with the release of this report. Critics came from all corners of society. Civil-rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis spoke out angrily against the report. Others said that is that it assumed that middle-class American values are the correct values for everyone in America. They suggested that he assumed everyone should have a family structure like his own.

After 55 years to observe what happened since its publication, I feel he was right. We now have generations of fatherless kids who have no guidance.

Widespread fatherlessness is a major problem in our society and is affecting people in ways they may not totally understand. Take a look at what is going on in communities all across the United States.

The effects of widespread fatherlessness are everywhere and has a direct impact on nearly all of the social issues facing America today. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 24 million children in America, almost one out of three, live in homes where the biological father is absent. The number of single parent households living below the poverty line is staggering. Poverty rates are highest for families headed by single women, particularly if they are black or Hispanic. In 2010, 31.6 percent of households headed by single women were poor, while 15.8 percent of households headed by single men and 6.2 percent of married-couple households lived in poverty. Since the publication of the Moynihan Report, the proportion of African American children born outside or marriage has ballooned from 24 percent to 70 percent today. Things are clearly not getting better.

Little has changed to improve the lives of black children since then. In fact, it has gotten worse. This is a phenomenon that is becoming a bigger problem than we’d like to admit. The acceptance of the ‘new normal’ of widespread fatherlessness will eventually have the same devastating effects in the white community as it has in the black community for decades.  Moynihan meant for the report to serve as a call to action for a larger discussion and planned social and political intervention. I feel the time has come to have that conversation, to begin a new dialogue and to spread awareness of the issues that still persist almost 50 years later.

Kay S. Hymowitz sums things up in her essay “The Black Family: 40 Years of Lies,”

So, have we reached the end of the Moynihan report saga? That would be vastly overstating matters. Remember: 70 percent of black children are still born to unmarried mothers. After all that ghetto dwellers have been through, why are so many people still unwilling to call this the calamity it is? Both NOW and the National Association of Social Workers continue to see marriage as a potential source of female oppression. The Children’s Defense Fund still won’t touch the subject. Hip-hop culture glamorizes ghetto life: “ ’cause nowadays it’s like a badge of honor/to be a baby mama” go the words to the current hit “Baby Mama,” which young ghetto mothers view as their anthem. Seriously complicating the issue is the push for gay marriage, which dismissed the formula “children growing up with their own married parents” as a form of discrimination. And then there is the American penchant for to-each-his-own libertarianism. In opinion polls, a substantial majority of young people say that having a child outside of marriage is okay—though, judging from their behavior, they seem to mean that it’s okay, not for them, but for other people. Middle- and upper-middle-class Americans act as if they know that marriage provides a structure that protects children’s development. If only they were willing to admit it to their fellow citizens.

There was a report written by the Urban Institute called The Moynihan Report Revisited. 50 years later, some of our government’s most intrusive policies have changed, but the reality is that life hasn’t been much easier for much of the black poor. Although social progress has created several opportunities for people in the black community, our country still struggles with many of the problems Moynihan identified back in 1965.

In the new report, they write:

“Today, the share of white children born outside marriage is about the same as the share of black children born outside marriage in Moynihan’s day.” “The percentage of black children born to unmarried mothers, in comparison, tripled between the early 1960s and 2009, remaining far higher than the percentage of white children born to unmarried mothers.”

Family is about security, power and resources. Having more than one parent around increases all three and the outcomes of families with more than one parent far outstrip those of single parent ones. It’s simple math and common sense.

Results of this single parenthood social experiment are not good:

”These demographic trends are stunning. Five decades after Moynihan’s work, white families exhibit the same rates of nonmarital childbearing and single parenting as black families did in the 1960s when Moynihan sounded his alarm. Meanwhile, the disintegration of the black nuclear family continued apace. That the decline of traditional families occurred across racial and ethnic groups indicates that factors driving the decline do not lie solely within the black community but in the larger social and economic context. Nevertheless, the consequences of these trends in family structure may be felt disproportionately among blacks as black children are far more likely to be born into and raised in father-absent families than are white children.”

Clayton Craddock is an independent thinker, father of two beautiful children in New York City. He is the drummer of the hit broadway musical Ain’t Too Proud. He earned a Bachelor of Business Administration froHoward University’s School of Business and is a 25 year veteran of the fast paced New York City music scene. He has played drums in a number of hit Broadway musicals including “Tick, tick…BOOM!,Altar Boyz, Memphis The Musical and Lady Day At Emerson’s Bar and Grill. In addition, Clayton has worked on: Footloose, Motown, The Color Purple, Rent, Little Shop of Horrors, Evita, Cats, and Avenue Q.

Clayton is the chair of the New York chapter of the National Parents Organization and is focused on promoting shared parenting, where both parents have equal standing raising children after a separation or divorce. He is writing a memoir and writes for various local and national publications.

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