








avei the House never reached the floor.
While these developments unfolded, Southe of course in no position to challenge the cla their welfare was critical. Nor did the free b York City under the leadership of the disting physician/abolitionist James McCune Smith si of having their memorial to Congress protes! umnies against free people of color  recogniz who held political power, it was imperative ths ply not exist except as objects, and the truth what was said was beside the point. What mat now, was not the facts but only that the sembli stance  be provided for a time sufficient to con and carry the day.
The Need to Segregate or Quarantine a 1
After the Civil War, the Calhoun view of th< generacy of blacks, which held that they coul outside slavery, was tenaciously clung to by bered whites of Mississippi. In 1865 the Meri asserted with unconcealed satisfaction that tl
From The Nation, July 24-31 1QBO
152
^doomed:  A hundred years is a long time to one man; lUt to a nation or a race, it is but a limited period. Well, in hat time the negro will be dead. 
In due course, Mississippi produced figures to prove it: 'he 1866 state census showed a more than 12 percent decline n the black population. Unfortunately for the prophets, lowever, this data was as accurate as Calhoun s: The 1870 federal census showed an increase of more than 7,000, vhich turned out to be an undercount of between 50,000 md 75,000, corrected in the 1880 Federal figures.
Nonetheless, in the 1880s, the Reverend C.K. Marshall, he most prominent preacher in the state, predicted that  by January, 1920 . . . except for a few old people [who] will linger as the Cherokees do on their reservation . . . the colored population of the south will scarcely be counted. 
With the passage of more years without apparent visible diminution in black ranks, however, white theories of a built-in biological solution to the black  problem  obviously had to be augmented. In The Plantation Negro as Freeman (1889), the historian Philip A. Bruce used the black family as a device for attacking all blacks. Bruce, the scion of a former Virginia slaveowner, simply advanced Calhoun s thesis: With the end of slavery, the loss of white  supervision  led to a severe and menacing deterioration in blacks  social and moral condition. The black family as such did not exist, he announced; black children, accordingly, were bom into a state of moral degeneracy.
Bruce viciously castigated black women. Alluding to the alleged propensity of black men to rape white women, he asserted that they found  something strangely alluring and seductive ... in the appearance of a white woman  because oft he  wantonness of the women of his own race.  The act   that black women failed to complain of being raped by men of their race counted as  strong proof of the sexual ^ess of plantation women as a class. 
erbert Gutman called Bruce s work perhaps the most  Portant connecting link between the  popular  views of ncan-American degeneracy in the 1880s and the support-wor^s the ensu*ng decades before . War I. These latter writings rested heavily on the survi  |C ent ^c data of Social Darwinism the doctrine of ftola''	The historian George Frederickson
reliance of such theories in his book The Black lma^m the White Mind-.
Prob* were a degenerating race with no future, the shin Ceasedt01* one  f how to prepare them for citizen-member7611 h W t0 make them more productive and useful tather t * commun'ty- The new prognosis pointed tn a 01 e necd to segregate or quarantine a race liable to fCe contam nat'on and social danger to the white vice 35 sank cver deeper into the slough of disease, ^d criminality.
still gainst these brutally repressive rationalizations ^ar U the Southern apartheid system after World eruPted T rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s it was at the climactic stages of that struggle
34.	Politics of Family in America that Labor Department official Daniel Patrick Moynihan conceived, in December 1964, his supposedly secret  internal memorandum  on the black family.
Whether Moynihan knew his history or not, his report served the time-tested purpose: Whenever the system is in crisis (or shows signs of becoming transformed); whenever blacks get restless (or show strength); whenever whites in significant numbers show signs of coming together with blacks to confront their mutual problems (or enemies), the trick is to shift the focus from the real struggle for political and economic empowerment to black  crime,  degeneracy, pathology and in Moynihan s innovative twist the  deterioration  of the black family (previously defined as nonexistent!).
Moynihan s report was subtitled  The Case for National Action.  But just how much serious  action  it intended was made plain in the author s next  internal memo  this time to Richard Nixon counseling  benign neglect. 
In the light of subsequent events it is interesting to discover in Pat, the Senator s biography, that it was presidential assistant Bill Moyers who, in May 1965, first brought the black family report, until then ignored, to Lyndon Johnson s attention and arranged for the President to deliver a major policy speech based on it.
Curiously, the Moyers-arranged speech bypassed all agencies of the government set up to aid the passage of the President s civil rights agenda. It was delivered at the graduation exercises of Howard University before an overwhelmingly black audience of thousands of students, parents, friends and dignitaries. Apparently few observers among the editors, journalists and scholars present found what Johnson did reprehensible. Howard was one of the colleges that had sent a sizable contingent of students into the revolutionary nonviolent Southern struggle which at that moment was galvanizing, inspiring and, in a thousand unforeseeable ways, transforming the nation. Before the young people whom he should have congratulated for the extraordinary example of sacrifice and heroism they were setting, the President emphasized the  historical  degenerate state of the families from which they came!
True, words of noble intent were there (as they were in Moynihan s original), and they heartened many. But so were the declarations of black degeneracy that reinforced the racism of many more and signaled the open-door policy for what was to come. Through the summer, however, the  secret  Moynihan report continued to be leaked to selected journalists. Then came the event that cemented its impact. Ten days after the August passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 Watts exploded and in a mad scramble for instant wisdom, journalists turned to the blackfamily report and drew on its conclusions as explanations for the violent civil disorders.
What did it explain? What were the causes of Watts and the^uccXg ghetto rebellions? Not, as the Kerner commission concluded in 1967, the division of America into two Ses separate and unequal. Not historical white racism, unemployment and the mtotatble eondt-
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6. AFRICAN AMERICANS
tions of the ghetto that cut short the dreams and lives of millions of black men, women and children. Not at all.  Ours is a society,  offered Moynihan,  which presumes male leadership in private and public affairs. . .. A subculture such as that of the Negro American, in which this is not the pattern, is placed at a distinct disadvantage." To overcome that disadvantage, he said, the malaise of the black family, characterized by the unnatural dominance of a  black matriarchy,  had to be cured.
In contrast, Moynihan wrote: "The white family has achieved a high degree of stability and is maintaining that stability." (Emphasis added.) Against the backdrop of the next twenty-five years, this declaration would be hilarious were it not for the fact that, for untold millions of white working women divorced, single and joint providers the idealized patriarchal structure held up as an icon had always been a myth! Indeed, even as Moynihan wrote the words, the modem women s movement for equal rights and a sense of selfhood, submerged under the centuries-old domination of that very model, was being forged in the crucible of the civil rights struggle.
MAMAS AND SUPERSTUDS
Raw and uncontrolled sex is at the root of the Black family problem. This is the most enduring of all lies about Blacks, and sociologists and historians froth at the mouth and strain at the leash of synonymity ( riotous debauchery,   unbridled passions,   wild and primitive emotions ) in passionate attempts to express this academic and political voyeurism. For most, if not almost all, critics of the Black family, there is always at the back of the mind this myth, this image of Black America as Babylon, where the Studs and Sapphires are always making babies, where in the words of the myth  They do it, honey, right out in the middle of the streets.  And one of the most challenging problems we face is confronting scholars, journalists and politicians, who have repeatedly used the Black family to exorcise the demons of their own sexuality and the guilt of their complicity in oppression. What makes this so difficult is that we are dealing here with a magical idea that is impervious to  facts.  There are, in fact, no facts in this area, for there has never been a systematic analysis of the sexual differences between American Blacks and American Whites. And the few facts we have contradict the supersex theory of Black history and suggest that the differences between racial groups are relatively small especially when you correct for economic and historical differences. More to the point, Blacks, according to the statistics, are not even in the running in the areas of wife-swapping and other experiments of the sexual revolution.	-Lerone Bennett Jr
Ebony, August 1986
Those who found the Moynihan report usefu sumably unaware that the archetypal sexism o rests is inextricable from its racism. At any rate, signaled, at the very height of the civil rights that Northern whites would pick up where the forced to leave off in blocking the long black s parity with whites in American life.
Line of Descent
On January 25, 1986, Bill Moyers, Moynihai booster, invoked the full power of a prime-tims CBS Special Report to beam the old theme into homes. The title: The Vanishing Black Family Black America (shades of the old Mississipp Clarion'.). The East Texan, in sympathetic  libi took cameras into a Newark, New Jersey, hous for an  intimate  portrait of black teen-age we ers, sexually irresponsible if not criminal youtl black male  superstud,  and pervasive pathology Moyers s report was directed not at the cause o of the people whose confidences he elicited. V shown, rather, a pathology in black America so ing and irredeemable as to leave the panel of bla in at the end to  discuss  the subject helpless the impact of the carefully selected imagery.
The result, whatever sympathy toward indivk white viewers might have felt, and whatever resj some might acknowledge that America has f  past,  could only be: First, to utte
