Segregation, of course, made it difficult to find well-paying jobs outside of black areas.
The third event was integration itself. With the coming of integration, affluent and middle-class African Americans could now find housing outside the crowding of the black ghetto. Only those who could not afford to move out—that is, the poorest—were left, often crowded together in high-rise public housing.
What had been poor but vertically integrated neighborhoods—where most people worked, social networks were intact, and institutions functioned—were now extremely poor areas where
only poor people lived with few or no social networks, no institutions of support, no jobs, and large numbers of people who did not work. Under such conditions, the results are predictable. The "surround of force" that people experience leads to despair, inertia, and increasing anti-social behavior.
By the 1960s, the wider society had begun to notice the changes occurring in the inner city. As always, there were analysts eager to blame the poor themselves for their poverty, but the political tenor of the times (as a society, we believed much more strongly then in structural causes of poverty than we do now) made it unfashionable to criticize poor people, and the structuralist view dominated. Due in part to the publication of Michael Harrington's
The Other America, the country was rediscovering poverty and wanted to do something about it.
In 1964, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a young advisor to President Johnson, wrote what was supposed to be a confidential memo to the President. Although the report,
The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, stressed male unemployment as the primary cause of black poverty, Moynihan also documented dramatic increases in single-parenthood among black families
4 and expressed concern about its impact on black poverty. The report was leaked, circulated widely, and the issue of single-parenthood was sensationalized by the press, causing a firestorm among liberals.
5 Black activists (their influence nearing its apex in the liberal community) interpreted the report as humiliating to blacks at a time when they were trying to support black strength and identity. More radical Black Power advocates condemned the report as another racist attempt to discredit black people. What right did this white man have even to write such a report about black people? Other (white) liberals didn't like it either, since it seemed to blame black people for their plight.
Footnotes
4 In
absolute numbers had been an explosion in black single-parenthood. The
ratio of black single-parent households to white single-parent households, however, has remained the same since 1950. In 1950, for instance, 17.2% of black households and 5.3% of white households were headed by women. The "black multiple" was 3.2. In 1993, the figures were 58.4% and 18.7% respectively, so the black multiple was essentially the same, 3.1.
5 The words "liberal" and "conservative" have been so misused as to become almost meaningless today. "Liberal," for instance, seems to describe anybody in favor of big government. In this book, I will use the term "liberal" to refer to those who emphasize the structural causes of poverty and see them as prior to and more important than behavioral causes. I will use the word "conservative" to refer to those who see individual agency as more important.
