Freedom Is Not Enough ─ The Moynihan Report and America's Struggle Over Black Family Life-From LBJ to Obama

In Freedom is Not Enough, award-winning historian James Patterson narrates the birth, life, and afterlife of the explosive Moynihan report, which altered the way we view race in America. In 1965, President Johnson was leading an optimistic nation toward progress, especially in regard to the civil rights movement, which had just achieved the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. But this momentum was quickly lost, in part due to the negative reception of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Report on Black Family Life. Moynihan marshaled a formidable array of alarming statistics to paint a grim portrait of inner-city black family life, and argued that immediate national action was imperative if America hoped to prevent lower-class black families from crumbling. So pivotal was the Moynihan report that the past half-century of race relations cannot be fully comprehended without considering its role in predicting?yet falling short of averting?decades of failure. Freedom Is Not Enough provides invaluable new insight into this crucial moment in American history, showing how the Moynihan report represents one of the great missed opportunities in 20th century American history.

James T. Patterson is Ford Foundation Professor of History Emeritus at Brown University. He is the author of Restless Giant, Brown V. Board of Education, and the Bancroft prize-winning Grand Expectations: The United States 1945-1974. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island.