Importance
The Moynihan Report has had long-lasting and important implications. Writing to President Lyndon Johnson, then-Assistant Secretary of Labor Patrick 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. This would cause rates of divorce, 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 female-headed households and the high rates of poverty, low educational outcomes, and inflated rates of abuse that are associated with them. Moynihan made a compelling contemporary argument for the provision of jobs, job programs, vocational training, and educational programs for the Black community. Modern scholars, including Douglas Massey, now consider the report one of the more influential in the construction of the War on Poverty.
Read more about this topic: The Negro Family: The Case For National Action
Famous quotes containing the word importance:
“The moment Germany rises as a great power, France gains a new importance as a cultural power.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“One’s condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One feels one’s being, one becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness—the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness of a pointless interruption, one becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness in others.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely. ‘Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by square miles of land, or other than by their importance to the mind of the time.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)