American doctrine is centered on the proposition of equal opportunity: of equal protection of the laws. The social struggles of the past have characteristically centered on the question of whether this group or that was being denied equal treatment.

The Civil Rights Bill will mark the consummation of that effort as far as the Negro is concerned.

Now comes the proposition that the Negro is entitled to damages as to unequal favored treatment—in order to compensate for past unequal treatment of an opposite kind.

We could cope with such a proposition were it put in terms of the rights of a group of workers, or of bond holders—functional groups—but have no precedent for treating with an ethnic group. (Consider the difficulty encountered in justifying “benign” quotas in activities such as housing projects which are designed to achieve a balance of races.)

But we cannot avoid it. The Negroes are asking for unequal treatment. More seriously, it may be that without unequal treatment in the immediate future there is no way for them to achieve anything like equal status in the long run.

THE BLACK FAMILY

March 5, 1965

A memorandum to President Lyndon Johnson contained what Wirtz, in a cover letter, described as “nine pages of dynamite about the Negro situation.” It is a distillation (clearly for the personal consumption of L.B.J.) of the so-called Moynihan Report, published by the Labor Department as “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” The report indeed exploded politically and forever helped to define Moynihan’s political identity.

Many persons mistakenly compare discrimination against Negroes with past discrimination against other groups.

As if, for example, breaking down barriers to Negro apprentices in the buildings trades was like breaking down the quotas on Jewish students in medical schools a generation ago. It is not. Once the bars were down the Jewish lads swarmed in to the schools and were more than equal to the competition of their fellow students.

We have been in the business of breaking down job barriers to Negroes for four years now. We can no longer deny that our hardest task is not to create openings, but to fill them

In the next five years the Negro work force will expand 20 percent. Twice the rate of the whites.

Many of these young persons pouring into the labor force are simply not going to be prepared to compete

Many explanations are put forward. In the Department of Labor, however, we feel that the master problem is that the Negro family structure is crumbling.

Somehow American national policy (quite the opposite is the case in Europe) has never given serious attention to the role of family structure in social problems. Yet everyone knows from personal experience how fundamental it is. You were born poor. You were brought up poor. Yet you came of age full of ambition, energy, and ability. Because your mother and father gave it to you. The richest inheritance any child can have is a stable, loving, disciplined family life. A quarter of the Negro children born in America last year were illegitimate. - 29 percent in Chicago

- 36 percent in Memphis - 43 percent in Harlem

The white illegitimacy rate is 3 percent.

R.F.K.’S LEGACY

July 25, 1968

A draft of a letter to Senator Edward M. Kennedy—discussing painful issues of race, class, and politics. It was written in response to a request from Kennedy for Moynihan’s thoughts about “a permanent living memorial that could be established for Bob.”

What I wish to say comes to this. I would hate to see a memorial to Bob fashioned in the image of whatever is the current vogue in upper middle class models of social change on behalf of whatever segment of the lower orders that are currently most in favor in the salons of Central Park West. Community action, neighborhood corporations, black, green, yellow power, peril, or whatever. Bob Kennedy as a political man descended from a tradition of stable, working class urban politics. It is the only element, so far as I can see, in the political system that ever did anything for him or for his family. That tradition is very much isolated now, and very much in trouble. It no longer fully understands what is going on, save to be clear that no one in power or fashion any longer is much interested in its problems. It seems to me that a Memorial for Bob must in some way include this group. In a word, the people of South Boston and Dorchester ought to be as much in our minds as those of Roxbury or Bedford-Stuyvesant, or whatever. Those are your people, they were Bob’s people before he got religion, they have been abandoned, and our politics are very much the worst for it. No one is much interested in them, no one admires much less likes them, no one tries to help them break out of the sour and self defeating attitudes which they have acquired