Beyond Civil Rights

In Beyond Civil Rights Daniel Geary examines the impact of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” (also known as the Moynihan Report). Written in 1965, the report has influenced academics, policy makers, social movement leaders, and has shaped both liberal and neoconservative conversations concerning race, gender, and poverty. Fifty years after the publication of the report, Geary sets out to examine how and why it has had, and continues to have, such an impact on our national discourse. Geary explains that unlike many analyses of the Moynihan Report, Beyond Civil Rights is not meant to examine Moynihan's assumptions. Rather, Geary weaves the multiple interpretations of the report with Moynihan's personal and theoretical backgrounds, providing a rich and thorough understanding of the document, its contradictions, and its implications. Based on interviews and Geary's examinations of multiple archival collections Beyond Civil Rights is a nuanced and engaging illumination of the internal contradictions within “The Negro Family,” which drove the variety of interpretations of Moynihan's analysis. Beyond Civil Rights establishes that arguments in the report led liberals and conservatives to accept and renounce its conclusions. For example, some liberals argued that the importance of the Moynihan Report was found in its structural explanations of the importance of job creation programs; however, many of Moynihan's assumptions about pathologies in African American families led liberal scholars and leaders to repudiate his claims. Alternately, conservatives emphasized Moynihan's links between family structure and poverty; the report's lack of policy proposals allowed conservatives to interpret “The Negro Family” as an analysis without specific call for government intervention. In fact, “Moynihan undermined his call for action and sowed the seed of a neoconservative challenge emerging from within postwar liberalism” (p. 72

Civil rights · Civil society · Political science · Politics · Poverty · Sociology · Gender Studies · Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics · Law · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies

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