ABSTRACT
The underclass is defined by poverty, high rates of joblessness, teenage pregnancy, illegitimacy, female-headed families, welfare dependency, and violent crime. It is disproportionately black. In 1965, the same year that Kenneth Clark published his bleak assessment of America’s “dark ghettos,” the Department of Labor published a report on the condition of black families. This well-known report, written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, described how nearly a quarter of black families were headed by single women—more than double the percentage for whites. The trend in single-parent black families, Moynihan explained, began to rise in 1940 and continued upward while the trend among whites remained relatively unchanged, or dropped slightly, during the same period. The Moynihan Report described what was to be the first ripples of a tidal wave of calamity that would by the end of the century threaten to destroy both marriage and the nuclear family among lower-class blacks.
