MOVING TO ASHLAND
That first trip to Kentucky was an ordeal by asphalt. We left Dayton on August 26, 1954, a Thursday morning. If my parents’ memories are accurate, there were eight of us sardined into our green Chevy Bellaire sedan: three adults—Mother, Grandma and Grandpa—and five children—Francois, Karen, Chris, Ida and me. Daddy was already in Ashland—he had started work there in June, returned to Dayton in July for Papa’s funeral, and then gone back to resume his job duties and find a house for us to live in and schools for us children to attend.
The three adults were crucial, because we would be traveling through the South and this was the era of segregation. Stopping overnight at a motel to rest was not an option, so we needed enough drivers to be able to drive straight through, more than 1,100 miles virtually non-stop. And long-distance car travel in those days was immeasurably harder than it is now.
There were no divided four-lane interstate highways with convenient rest stops and restaurant facilities. It was all two-lane roads, often with little or no shoulder, so the margin for driver error was narrow to nonexistent. You passed through the middle of every -burg and -ville and metropolis along the way, stopping at every red light and hoping not to run afoul of local cops looking to make their ticket quotas by stopping out-of-state drivers going a mile or two over the posted limit. You were at the mercy of every driver of a broken-down jalopy or a rickety pickup hauling hay or old furniture or anything else that might come tumbling out of the truckbed.
If the driver ahead of you had decided to take a Sunday drive on Thursday, you had to carefully pick your chance to pass him so you could travel at the posted maximum speed.
If you were black, the troubles were compounded. If you needed food, you had to go to the rear of whatever hamburger joint or ice cream stand you stopped at to be served. Most black travelers tried to avoid the need for that by packing plenty of pre-cooked food in their cars, including, almost always, a large supply of fried chicken. The chicken always smelled delicious and mouthwatering at the start of the trip, but by the end the smell was more likely to cause nausea.
The gas station where you stopped to fill up (“Raglar or ethyl?” the attendant would invariably ask) might or might not have a restroom for “colored.” And especially at night, you had to be on the watch for gangs of “good ole boys” out to have a good time by running black folks off the road, or worse.
We had an added complication on this trip: We were part of a two-vehicle caravan. We were following the truck that carried all our household effects. The truck was owned by a white fellow from Dayton, Herman Payne, who was a friend of Grandma and Grandpa. He had agreed to move our stuff to Ashland for $300. So as we traveled—from Dayton to Beaumont in Texas; through DeQuincy, DeRidder, Leesville, Alexandria, Monroe and Bastrop in Louisiana; up through Greenville in Arkansas; through Clarksdale in the Mississippi delta and on up to Memphis, Humboldt and Clarksville in Tennessee, and finally into Kentucky, through Bowling Green to Elizabethtown to Bardstown and Versailles to Lexington, Winchester, Morehead, Grayson and, finally, Ashland—we were constantly trying to keep up with Herman’s truck, driven alternately by him, his wife Muriel and Uncle Sam Wickliff, Grandpa’s youngest brother, who was an auto mechanic and was recruited as a third driver for the truck.
As the adults took turns driving, we children took turns being carsick and, especially after we got into the rolling hills and mountains of eastern Kentucky, throwing up. (In later years on other trips we learned how to deal with that problem: We ate saltine crackers all the time. As long as you were forcing something down your gullet, nothing could come up.) And when we got antsy, the adults would distract us with a game: See if you can spot the billowing tarp over the bed of Herman’s truck ahead of us.
We got to Ashland early the morning of Saturday, August 28, and found our way to the house at the south end of town that Daddy had rented for us. I don’t remember much about the house except that it was on a hill and the front yard sloped steeply down to a sidewalk and the street. I recall being amazed that we were going to be living on a paved street, with sidewalks next to it, instead of a highway with drainage ditches on the sides, or on a dirt road.
Daddy and the three other men promptly began unloading the truck and placing things in the house. Mother recalled that they were almost finished when, abruptly, everything came to a stop. A white man showed up at the front door and began talking with Daddy. Mother said she couldn’t hear what was being said at first, but saw that Daddy began to look “downhearted.”
She walked to the front door where Daddy and the man were standing.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
Daddy explained that the man was the landlord, and he was saying that some of the neighbors had called him and complained when they saw a “colored” family moving in. As far as he was concerned, the landlord said, we could stay in the house, but he couldn’t know what the neighbors might do.
That was no consolation to Daddy, who replied, “How do you think I would feel going off to work every day knowing my family may be in danger?”
Under these circumstances, Mother and Daddy both realized, we couldn’t remain in the house; they would have to find another. But also under the circumstances, we would have to stay in this house at least until they could find a new one. The landlord suggested that Daddy go to the police and ask them to keep a special eye on the place as long as we were there.
At this point, Herman spoke up. It is important to appreciate who Herman Payne was. If you had been a Hollywood casting director looking for someone to play the quintessential redneck, you couldn’t have picked anyone better than Herman. Big, redheaded, not particularly well-educated, he was just a workingman, scuffling to make a living however he could. He and Muriel had a passel of children, and I still remember going to their house for a visit one night before we moved away from Dayton. They had an old piano and someone played it while everybody sang, “Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here.” I remember it so well because, once again, a word tripped me up. I thought everybody was singing “Hell, Hell, the Gang’s All Here,” and it gave me a bit of a thrill that everybody was singing so lustily this word we children were forbidden to say.
Anyway, pointing to Mother, who was five months pregnant with the baby who would become my sister Joy, Herman addressed the landlord. “This woman has been on the road for three days,” he said, “and she’s in no condition to be moving anywhere tonight. Now I’m gonna spend the night in my truck out back with my shotgun, and if anybody comes around here trying to mess with these people, they’re gonna have to deal with me.”
And he did.
Daddy went to the police and told them about the situation. The police said there had been no racial incidents in that part of town, but they agreed to keep a special watch on the house that night.
The next day, Sunday, Daddy and the other men went out to look for another house. Daddy had previously noticed a vacant house on Central Avenue, also in south Ashland, but had been unable to find anyone who could show him the place or tell him how much the rent might be. On this Sunday, however, luck was with him. He knocked on the door of the house next door and found the residents home.
It turned out that the lady of the house, Christine Kinney, was handling the showing and renting of the place for the owner, who lived in Cincinnati.
Mrs. Kinney—or “Miss Chris” as we children later learned to call her—showed him the place. Daddy rented it on the spot and we moved in that same day. There was no need to spend another night at the house on the hill, no need for Herman Payne to sleep in his truck, cradling his shotgun.
That house, at 3137 Central Avenue, was our home for the next four years. Like every other house we lived in, it was too small—living room, kitchen, two bedrooms, one bath. But that was par for the course in those days of big families and little affluence. Our parents had one bedroom, the girls had another. Francois and I shared a foldout couch in the living room and Chris was on a cot next to us.
The living room had fireplace that didn’t work and a mantle, something I had never seen before. There was a porch that wrapped around both the front and the south side of the house. The yard—a big one with a tall apple tree in the center—was on the north side.
Most important, the house was safe. The neighbors to the south and east were black, those to the north and west were white. There was no friction in the neighborhood. There would be no racial danger here.
Safely housed at last, we children still needed to be schooled. And so on Monday morning, August 30, not yet 24 hours in the new house, Mother took Francois, Karen and me to enroll us for the first time in Catholic school. It would also be, not incidentally, the first time that Francois and I would attend school with white children.
I had finished first grade and Francois had finished fifth in June at Colbert Elementary School in Dayton. In Ashland, as in Dayton, the public schools were segregated. Had we gone to public school, we would have enrolled at Booker T. Washington, the colored school in Ashland. This even though the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled four months earlier, on May 17, 1954, that separate but equal had no place in public education in the U.S. It would be half a dozen years before public schools in Ashland were integrated.
But Daddy didn’t want to wait.
It was his boss at the prison, Walter Graybeal, who suggested that he look into sending us to Catholic school. “You’re Catholic, aren’t you, Wyc?” he asked. “Well, why don’t you send your kids to Catholic school just like anybody else would?”
Daddy knew it wasn’t as simple as doing “just like anybody else would.” But he liked the idea and decided to go and see if his black Catholic children really could attend Holy Family School.
It was early August when he went and knocked on the door of the parish rectory on Winchester Avenue in north Ashland. The housekeeper answered the door and Daddy asked to speak to the pastor. Within a few minutes he was talking with Msgr. Declan Carroll.
With his florid face, snow white hair and unmistakably Irish brogue, Father Carroll was another of those characters who could have been sent from central casting. He was, in fact, an Irish immigrant, born in 1886 in the village of Clashmore in County Waterford on the southern coast of Ireland. He and his family moved to the U.S. around 1897. They settled in Covington in northern Kentucky, just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. Young Declan attended St. Xavier High School and then St. Xavier College in Cincinnati. He went on to St. Thomas College at the Catholic University of America from 1906 to 1910. In 1911 he attended St. Mary Seminary in Baltimore as a student for the Diocese of Covington. He was ordained on June 21, 1911, by Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore, and returned to Covington.
Daddy told him that he was new to Ashland, that he was employed at the Federal Correctional Institution, that he was Catholic and he wanted to enroll his children in the parish school.
Without hesitation, Msgr. Carroll replied, “I don’t see why your children can’t attend our school.” But just to be sure, he said, let him confer with the bishop, in Covington. He promised to call Daddy at work the following Wednesday.
On Tuesday, Daddy said, he was summoned to his departmental office to take a phone call. It was Father Carroll.
“Mr. Wycliff, the bishop says that the Catholic schools are for all Catholic children,” the priest said. “Your children will be welcome in our school.”
At that point, the old priest could have congratulated himself and gone back to business as usual. But he didn’t. A few weeks later—actually, it seems to have been on that very Sunday when Daddy was scrambling to find us a place to live—Msgr. Carroll took to the pulpit at mass and made an announcement.
One of Daddy’s colleagues at the prison told him that the priest had told his parishioners that there were going to be “colored children” attending the parish school that fall and that he wanted them treated with decency and respect. And if anyone did not do so, he said, that person would have to answer to him personally.
Mother wasn’t aware of that, however, as she arrived with Francois, Karen and me at the school that Monday morning. What she was aware of, she said, were news reports about black children in another Kentucky town, Sturgis, being “stoned” as they tried to integrate their local public school. “I thought,” she said, “that they might try to stone me.”
The registration site was the convent, where the Sisters of Divine Providence, who staffed Holy Family, lived. The convent had a large, screened front porch where mothers and their children congregated to wait to register. Mother nervously approached the building, opened the door and took a position near it, with her back against a wall and her three children drawn in close—in case, she said, she needed to make a fast escape.
For several minutes no one said anything, either hostile or welcoming. And then, a lady standing on the opposite side of the porch with a little girl approached.
The woman smiled and asked, “What is your little girl’s name?”
“Karen,” Mother replied. “Karen Wycliff.”
“Why, that’s my daughter’s name, too!” the lady exclaimed.
Then, turning to her daughter, she said, “Karen Horgan, meet Karen Wycliff.”
The woman’s name was Virginia Horgan, and her gesture of friendship broke the ice for Mother and dispelled her fears of being stoned or spurned. “You’ll never know what a smile can mean to a person,” Mother used to say when she recalled that day.
Mother’s anxiety was relieved, but she wasn’t the only one with concerns. I was full of anxiety, and I’m sure Francois must have been, also. My fears came to the fore on Tuesday, the first day of classes, when Sister Helen Joseph marched our second grade class over to the church for mass. Half the class filed into pews on one side of the center aisle and the other half went to the other side.
Whether because my last name began with a “W” or because I was tall or for some other reason entirely, I was at the back of the formation on the left side.
After mass, we were supposed to file out of our seats into the middle aisle, genuflect, and then walk out with a partner who would be coming from a pew on the opposite side of the aisle. As the children in the rows ahead of me filed out, my anxiety grew. Would I have a partner or would I be all alone? What if none of these new people, these white people, wanted to walk with me?
Suddenly, it was my row that was moving out into the aisle. And then it was my turn. I stepped out of my pew, genuflected and looked to my right, where my partner should be. And there was a boy, about my height, with dark, crew-cut hair, waiting to walk out with me. His name was Johnny Thompson, and it turned out that he and his big family lived just a few doors north of us on Central Avenue. He liked to play army and, he later informed me, he liked “Ike”—President Dwight Eisenhower. I didn’t care about Ike, but I liked Johnny, that day and always, because he was my partner and I was not left to walk alone.
Even after that episode, my anxieties about my new circumstances were not over. After the first marking period, I brought home a report card on which Sister Helen Joseph had noted that I didn’t participate much in class discussions, didn’t associate with my classmates and was, in general, not fitting in.
Daddy took me aside one night for a conversation about this. I recall sitting with him at the table in our green-walled kitchen as he asked me gently what was wrong. I don’t recall that I had a coherent answer for him. I think he already knew that I was full of fear of my new surroundings—the city, the school, the people, the novel experience of being so much among white people—and full of longing for my old surroundings—my cousin Sam Brown and my friends in Dayton, Grandma and Grandpa and their house and farm, Dayton and all it represented in terms of home.
What has stuck with me through all my years was one question that Daddy asked me: Would you like to go back to Dayton and live with Grandma and Grandpa and go to school there?
The answer to that one was easy. Yes and no. Of course I would like to go back, but I didn’t want to be separated from him and Mother and all of my brothers and sisters. Seven years old is too young to struggle with such a dilemma.
Of course, I don’t think Daddy would have sent me back to Dayton anyway. I know that now. But I didn’t know it then.
Somehow, after that conversation, I began to find my footing at Holy Family and in Ashland. Over time, I made friends in class and became a good student. But God! How hard those early days were!
They must have been even harder for Francois, who was just at the threshold of adolescence when we moved and who had been accustomed to spending as much time at Grandma’s and Grandpa’s house as at ours in Dayton. I once tried to ask Francois about that move and his feelings about it, and his response left no doubt in my mind that he felt cheated by having been forced to move. He wouldn’t talk about it much.
Of the three of us who were in school that year, Karen, I think, had the easiest time. She had not been in school previously and so had no old patterns and expectations to overcome. She quickly made friends—Pamela Marzetti, the daughter of another of Daddy’s colleagues at the prison, and Judy Terreo, whose father owned an office supply store—were her great pals, along with Karen Horgan. Karen became the mascot for the Holy Family school cheerleading squad. And she thrived.
Ultimately, all of us thrived academically. We learned to “talk proper”—pronouncing “er” in the standard American way instead of as “uh,” the Brooklyn, Boston, and African-American way.
In Dayton I had been one of the better students in my first grade class, but Sister Helen Joseph made me a bluebird instead of a cardinal in her reading groups. I distinctly recall being upset about this and put a whip to my horses to get into the top group, the cardinals.
With Mother’s enthusiastic approval, Sister Helen Joseph also converted me from a left handed writer to a righty. There used to be a belief, which I think Mother shared, that one was in some way in the grip of the devil if one was left-handed. So she had the good sister perform an exorcism. I have always felt as if that enforced change left me in some measure permanently confused.
Francois, who had taken piano lessons for several years already, thrived as a piano student under Sister Mary Herman, the music teacher at Holy Family.
Mother used to relate how some of the other mothers in the school asked her one day whether she allowed us to watch television. Yes, she replied. The other women said they thought that perhaps she did not, because it was well-known that the Wycliff children were the smartest in their classes and they thought it probably was because we didn’t watch TV.
In fact, we were avid TV watchers. But we were equally avid readers, thanks to the Sisters of Divine Providence. Those nuns were motivational geniuses, using fancily decorated “holy cards” and slogans like “Readers are Leaders” to inculcate in us and our classmates a love of reading. I remember my fourth grade teacher, Sister John Catherine, reading aloud to us in class in brief installments a book called “Outlaws of Ravenhurst.” I could hardly wait for each new day to hear what came next in that book.
The reading habit cultivated by the nuns was fertilized by the presence in Ashland of a public library, where there was no color bar. Karen and I first, and later Chris, fell in love with a series of biographies of famous (and some not so famous) Americans. Each book had a blue cover and was emblazoned with the name of the subject and his or her claim to fame—Zebulon Pike: Explorer, George Washington Carver: Scientist, etc. For months, we went to the library in Central Park and brought home one, two, three of these biographies at a time and devoured them.
At some point, Daddy grew tired of seeing those blue-backed books and felt we needed to vary our reading. So he declared that he didn’t want to see another of those blue books come into the house. Read something else, he said.
We quickly discovered that the library carried the same series with orange covers. Our hunger for biographies was satisfied and Daddy’s desire for variety in our reading was frustrated—by a simple change of colors.
There was one gap, one hole, in our Holy Family experience—in mine in a puerile way and in Francois’ more seriously. Dating, relationships with opposite sex, were out of the question. The proscription against interracial romantic relationships was something Father Carroll and nobody else could—or would—knock down. It was just not going to happen in 1954, in Kentucky, in most of the United States….
An African-American family, circa 1945, on the walk in front of their home. (Lambert, Getty photo / December 31, 1969)
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History doesn't allow do-overs. But if it did, I wonder how many of the black critics who came down like a ton of bricks on Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1965, when he published his policy paper on "the Negro family," would do the same today with the benefit of almost 50 years of hindsight.
If what has happened in recent days to Don Lemon is any indication, Moynihan would catch no less hell.
Lemon, the CNN weekend news anchor, had the audacity to agree with some criticism — I might even dignify it with the term "analysis" — by Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly to the effect that much of the "chaos" in the "black precincts" these days is the result of the disintegration of the black family and the unstructured upbringing that too many young black men experience as a result.
Lemon not only agreed with O'Reilly, but went him one better, offering five proposals that he said would improve black life and black communities. The five:
• To black youngsters, pull up your pants;
• Stop using the N-word;
• Respect where you live by, for example, not littering;
• Finish high school and thereby improve your earning power; and
• Put off having children until you're married, and don't add to the grim statistic that shows 73 percent of black children born in this country now are born to single women, vastly increasing the odds that they will fail in school and in life.
Now to black people of a certain age like me, these things seem entirely sensible and unexceptionable. It's what we grew up hearing from our elders, whether they had had the opportunity to be educated or not. To them, it was common sense and anyone who would say otherwise, even if he had a Ph.D., was nothing more than an "educated fool."
Attack mode
But to have read some of the responses to Lemon on Facebook and black-oriented websites, you'd have thought he had called for the resurrection of Uncle Tom and the rebuilding of his cabin too. Within the last few days, I've seen a new epithet applied to Lemon, a new put-down. Lemon, it is said, advocates a "politics of respectability." It seems that his advice — not littering, pulling up your pants, not using the N-word, finishing high school and getting married before you have kids — was Lemon's attempt to make himself feel good, not to really help the people he was addressing. How that merits the title "politics of respectability" I'm not sure, but what the heck.
One of Lemon's more sensible critics, the black hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons, took him to task in an open letter, in the course of which he said: "If you want to tell the rest of America this weekend when you go back on CNN how we fix black America, tell them to restart the 'War on Poverty.' "
Funny Simmons should mention that, because that's where Moynihan comes in. Moynihan, who later became a United States senator from New York and famously went against his president by voting against the 1996 welfare reform law, was a young assistant secretary of labor in March 1965 when he wrote for President Lyndon B. Johnson a document titled "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action."
The burden of the document was that the legal structure for assuring black equality was being erected as a result of the Civil Rights movement. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been enacted and signed into law the year before and the Voting Rights Act would become law just a few months later.
The nation now needed to turn to assuring that blacks could enjoy the fruits of equal opportunity with something approaching equality of results. However, Moynihan said after reviewing a host of sociological and economic data, "in terms of ability to win out in the competitions of American life, (the Negro people) are not equal to most of those groups with which they will be competing."
The key competitive weakness of the black population, he said, lay in the "Negro social structure, in particular the Negro family," which he said had been "battered and harassed by discrimination, injustice and uprooting" and was "in the deepest trouble."
The family was key because "(t)he family is the basic social unit of American life; it is the basic socializing unit. By and large, adult conduct in society is learned as a child."
And the weakest link in the weak black family structure was the black male, whose role as husband, father, provider, head of household, disciplinarian had been systematically undermined over centuries of slavery and segregation, the quasi-slavery that followed Reconstruction.
Moynihan made clear that he was not talking about all "Negroes" when he described this weakness. "It might be estimated," he said, "that as much as half of the Negro community falls into the middle class. However, the remaining half is in desperate and deteriorating circumstances."
And he left no doubt as to where the blame for this weakness lay: in slavery and its segregated aftermath. "American slavery was profoundly different from, and in its lasting effects on individuals and their children, indescribably worse than, any recorded servitude, ancient or modern," Moynihan wrote.
A call to action
It was those lasting effects that produced the disadvantages under which Negroes labored in 1965, and which, Moynihan said, required "national action."
Significantly, Moynihan did not offer any concrete plan of national action. The purpose of his paper, he said, was diagnosis, not prescription.
And yet, given Moynihan's role in conceptualizing the War on Poverty and Johnson's masterful politicking to get it created, it is not unreasonable to suppose that a prescription — had the opportunity offered by that moment been seized — would have involved policies and programs aimed at strengthening the position of black men in the labor market, and therefore in their families.
But that opportunity was not seized. And while the reasons have been debated for decades and will be for decades more, it was at least in part because many black critics took exception to Moynihan's characterization of the black family structure as "matriarchal" and characterized by a "tangle of pathology." His paper, the critics said, amounted to "blaming the victim."
No amount of genuflecting to the horrors of slavery as the cause of black disadvantage could rescue Moynihan's call for "national action."
Neither could Moynihan's own track record in the War on Poverty and the fact that he had the ear of a president prepared to spend political capital in the cause of black advancement. (Barack Obama can only dream of having the kind of political capital — and the ability to wheel and deal with it — that Lyndon B. Johnson enjoyed.)
Neither could his prescient observation about matriarchy versus patriarchy. "There is, presumably, no special reason why a society in which males are dominant in family relationships is to be preferred to a matriarchal arrangement," he wrote. "However, it is clearly a disadvantage for a minority group to be operating on one principle, while the great majority of the population, and the one with the most advantages to begin with, is operating on another."
And lastly, neither could Moynihan's invocation of legendary black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier in support of his thesis save his call for "national action." Quoting from an article by Frazier in 1950:
"As the result of family disorganization a large proportion of Negro children and youth have not undergone the socialization which only the family can provide. The disorganized families have failed to provide for their emotional needs and have not provided the discipline and habits which are necessary for personality development. Because the disorganized family has failed in its function as a socializing agency, it has handicapped the children in their relations to the institutions in the community. Moreover, family disorganization has been partially responsible for a large amount of juvenile delinquency and adult crime among Negroes. Since the widespread family disorganization among Negroes has resulted from the failure of the father to play the role in family life required by American society, the mitigation of this problem must await those changes in the Negro and American society which will enable the Negro father to play the role required of him."
Bad news
In a scenario that Don Lemon would recognize, Moynihan and his "case for national action" were shouted down and sent packing. Then, as now, the attitude of the critics was like that of the witch Evilene in "The Wiz": "Don't nobody bring me no bad news!"
There is a haunting line on the last page of Moynihan's paper. Referring to Frazier's quote above, Moynihan writes: "Nothing was done in response to Frazier's argument. Matters were left to take care of themselves, and as matters will, grew worse not better."
Nothing was done in response to Moynihan's argument. As a result, we have gone from a situation in which one in every four black children was born out of wedlock to one in which three of every four are. As a result, instead of "national action" along the lines of the War on Poverty, we got national action in the form of a war on drugs. Instead of concerted action to improve black men's position in the labor market, we have a society in which even the armed forces no longer exist as an employer — and socializer — of last resort. And young boys who have never had the consistent, civilizing discipline of a loving father subject their communities to a reign of terror, firing guns wantonly and taking down 4-year-olds and 6-month-olds.
But, hey, don't nobody bring me no bad news. Sing me a lullaby instead, about a new War on Poverty. Take me to fantasyland.
Don Wycliff teaches journalism at Loyola University Chicago.
If what has happened in recent days to Don Lemon is any indication, Moynihan would catch no less hell.
Lemon, the CNN weekend news anchor, had the audacity to agree with some criticism — I might even dignify it with the term "analysis" — by Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly to the effect that much of the "chaos" in the "black precincts" these days is the result of the disintegration of the black family and the unstructured upbringing that too many young black men experience as a result.
Lemon not only agreed with O'Reilly, but went him one better, offering five proposals that he said would improve black life and black communities. The five:
• To black youngsters, pull up your pants;
• Stop using the N-word;
• Respect where you live by, for example, not littering;
• Finish high school and thereby improve your earning power; and
• Put off having children until you're married, and don't add to the grim statistic that shows 73 percent of black children born in this country now are born to single women, vastly increasing the odds that they will fail in school and in life.
Now to black people of a certain age like me, these things seem entirely sensible and unexceptionable. It's what we grew up hearing from our elders, whether they had had the opportunity to be educated or not. To them, it was common sense and anyone who would say otherwise, even if he had a Ph.D., was nothing more than an "educated fool."
Attack mode
But to have read some of the responses to Lemon on Facebook and black-oriented websites, you'd have thought he had called for the resurrection of Uncle Tom and the rebuilding of his cabin too. Within the last few days, I've seen a new epithet applied to Lemon, a new put-down. Lemon, it is said, advocates a "politics of respectability." It seems that his advice — not littering, pulling up your pants, not using the N-word, finishing high school and getting married before you have kids — was Lemon's attempt to make himself feel good, not to really help the people he was addressing. How that merits the title "politics of respectability" I'm not sure, but what the heck.
One of Lemon's more sensible critics, the black hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons, took him to task in an open letter, in the course of which he said: "If you want to tell the rest of America this weekend when you go back on CNN how we fix black America, tell them to restart the 'War on Poverty.' "
Funny Simmons should mention that, because that's where Moynihan comes in. Moynihan, who later became a United States senator from New York and famously went against his president by voting against the 1996 welfare reform law, was a young assistant secretary of labor in March 1965 when he wrote for President Lyndon B. Johnson a document titled "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action."
The burden of the document was that the legal structure for assuring black equality was being erected as a result of the Civil Rights movement. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been enacted and signed into law the year before and the Voting Rights Act would become law just a few months later.
The nation now needed to turn to assuring that blacks could enjoy the fruits of equal opportunity with something approaching equality of results. However, Moynihan said after reviewing a host of sociological and economic data, "in terms of ability to win out in the competitions of American life, (the Negro people) are not equal to most of those groups with which they will be competing."
The key competitive weakness of the black population, he said, lay in the "Negro social structure, in particular the Negro family," which he said had been "battered and harassed by discrimination, injustice and uprooting" and was "in the deepest trouble."
The family was key because "(t)he family is the basic social unit of American life; it is the basic socializing unit. By and large, adult conduct in society is learned as a child."
And the weakest link in the weak black family structure was the black male, whose role as husband, father, provider, head of household, disciplinarian had been systematically undermined over centuries of slavery and segregation, the quasi-slavery that followed Reconstruction.
Moynihan made clear that he was not talking about all "Negroes" when he described this weakness. "It might be estimated," he said, "that as much as half of the Negro community falls into the middle class. However, the remaining half is in desperate and deteriorating circumstances."
And he left no doubt as to where the blame for this weakness lay: in slavery and its segregated aftermath. "American slavery was profoundly different from, and in its lasting effects on individuals and their children, indescribably worse than, any recorded servitude, ancient or modern," Moynihan wrote.
A call to action
It was those lasting effects that produced the disadvantages under which Negroes labored in 1965, and which, Moynihan said, required "national action."
Significantly, Moynihan did not offer any concrete plan of national action. The purpose of his paper, he said, was diagnosis, not prescription.
And yet, given Moynihan's role in conceptualizing the War on Poverty and Johnson's masterful politicking to get it created, it is not unreasonable to suppose that a prescription — had the opportunity offered by that moment been seized — would have involved policies and programs aimed at strengthening the position of black men in the labor market, and therefore in their families.
But that opportunity was not seized. And while the reasons have been debated for decades and will be for decades more, it was at least in part because many black critics took exception to Moynihan's characterization of the black family structure as "matriarchal" and characterized by a "tangle of pathology." His paper, the critics said, amounted to "blaming the victim."
No amount of genuflecting to the horrors of slavery as the cause of black disadvantage could rescue Moynihan's call for "national action."
Neither could Moynihan's own track record in the War on Poverty and the fact that he had the ear of a president prepared to spend political capital in the cause of black advancement. (Barack Obama can only dream of having the kind of political capital — and the ability to wheel and deal with it — that Lyndon B. Johnson enjoyed.)
Neither could his prescient observation about matriarchy versus patriarchy. "There is, presumably, no special reason why a society in which males are dominant in family relationships is to be preferred to a matriarchal arrangement," he wrote. "However, it is clearly a disadvantage for a minority group to be operating on one principle, while the great majority of the population, and the one with the most advantages to begin with, is operating on another."
And lastly, neither could Moynihan's invocation of legendary black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier in support of his thesis save his call for "national action." Quoting from an article by Frazier in 1950:
"As the result of family disorganization a large proportion of Negro children and youth have not undergone the socialization which only the family can provide. The disorganized families have failed to provide for their emotional needs and have not provided the discipline and habits which are necessary for personality development. Because the disorganized family has failed in its function as a socializing agency, it has handicapped the children in their relations to the institutions in the community. Moreover, family disorganization has been partially responsible for a large amount of juvenile delinquency and adult crime among Negroes. Since the widespread family disorganization among Negroes has resulted from the failure of the father to play the role in family life required by American society, the mitigation of this problem must await those changes in the Negro and American society which will enable the Negro father to play the role required of him."
Bad news
In a scenario that Don Lemon would recognize, Moynihan and his "case for national action" were shouted down and sent packing. Then, as now, the attitude of the critics was like that of the witch Evilene in "The Wiz": "Don't nobody bring me no bad news!"
There is a haunting line on the last page of Moynihan's paper. Referring to Frazier's quote above, Moynihan writes: "Nothing was done in response to Frazier's argument. Matters were left to take care of themselves, and as matters will, grew worse not better."
Nothing was done in response to Moynihan's argument. As a result, we have gone from a situation in which one in every four black children was born out of wedlock to one in which three of every four are. As a result, instead of "national action" along the lines of the War on Poverty, we got national action in the form of a war on drugs. Instead of concerted action to improve black men's position in the labor market, we have a society in which even the armed forces no longer exist as an employer — and socializer — of last resort. And young boys who have never had the consistent, civilizing discipline of a loving father subject their communities to a reign of terror, firing guns wantonly and taking down 4-year-olds and 6-month-olds.
But, hey, don't nobody bring me no bad news. Sing me a lullaby instead, about a new War on Poverty. Take me to fantasyland.
Don Wycliff teaches journalism at Loyola University Chicago.