Daniel Geary. Beyond Civil Rights

In Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy, historian Daniel Geary explores the fifty-year controversy over The Negro Family: A Case for National Action (the Moynihan Report), a 1965 report by then–Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Geary argues convincingly that the report illuminates broader shifts in American racial politics since the 1960s and “remains a contested reference point for debating the causes and cures of African American inequality” (2). Drawing extensively on published discussions, archival collections, and interviews, Beyond Civil Rights is in fact a capacious history of political change in the so-called post–civil rights era that helps explain how “a report written to convince the Johnson administration to go ‘beyond civil rights’ is used [today] to rationalize that civil rights legislation alone could overcome centuries of injustice toward African Americans” (10). Rejecting conventional wisdom that blames controversy on misunderstandings over Moynihan’s true intent (whether liberal or conservative), Geary argues that the report reflected internal contradictions within and limitations of 1960s liberalism itself.

Civil rights · Civil society · Injustice · Legislation · Liberalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies