On March 18, Kutztown University will host a forum on the history and meaning of the report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, written by Patrick Moynihan 50 years ago.

In 1965, Assistant Secretary of Labor in the Johnson Administration Patrick Moynihan wrote an internal government policy report to provide support for the unveiling of the declaration of the War on Poverty.

Ten years after the beginning of the modern Civil Rights Movement, with the Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, and culminating in the landmark passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, policy attention shifted from ending racial Jim Crow and segregation to economic disparities and the failure of black families to attain the American Dream.

In his famous "Freedom is Not Enough" speech at Howard University in July 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson said, "The voting rights bill will [establish the freedom to vote]... But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free ... You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him ... and then say, 'You are free to compete with all the others,' and still justly believe that you have been completely fair ... To this end, equal opportunity is essential, but not enough, not enough."

It was this speech along with Johnson's War on Poverty speech before Congress in January 1964 that began four years of social programs which resulted in Medicare, Medicaid, federal school loans, food stamps and a host of others between 1964 and 1968.

The author of Johnson's 1965 speech was Patrick Moynihan.

Being at the cusp of leadership of major policy implementation, Moynihan was sidelined when his report was leaked to the press.

The report made two conclusions regarding the state of the black family.

First, was its dysfunctionality and it was getting worse as far as its stability. Second, the damage to the black family could be addressed through direct social programs, the top being employment for the black male and allowing the black male to be the patriarch of his family with support from the black female – just as it was in white families.

The damage to the black family, according to Moynihan, was caused by two factors. The first was centuries of slavery and Jim Crow and its impact on the structure of the black family.

As Moynihan explained, "[t]hree centuries of injustice have brought about deep-seated structural distortions in the life of the Negro American" and the "Negro situation ... commonly perceived by whites in terms of the visible manifestation of discrimination and poverty" needed to evolve in order to consider "the effect that three centuries of exploitation have had on the fabric of Negro society itself."

The second factor was the matriarchal nature of the black family in which the black male was neither the bread winner nor the male role model of manhood for young black males, which leads to failure in school and delinquent behavior.

As Moynihan wrote, "[T]he negro community has been forced into a maternal structure ... out of line with the rest of the American society" the result being a weak family structure suffering from "a tangle of pathology."

At the center of the tangle of pathology is "25 percent of Black families not intact[,] 24 percent of Black children born illegitimate [and] 25 percent of Black families were single female headed households."

Conservatives of the 1960s, as they do today, ignore the first factor and hail the second factor a political orthodoxy.

The report was only intended for internal government review as an empirical justification for the policies of the War on Poverty.

The goal of the report was to justify the need for national action. What Moynihan received for his effort was national condemnation.

Blacks, liberal ones anyway, cursed him and his report as blaming the victim and justifying racist ideals.

Feminists, both black and white, cursed the report for blaming women for the problem of the family and supporting a patriarchal view of America that was under direct challenge by the women's movement of the middle and late 1960s.

Due to the backlash, the report was abandoned by the Johnson Administration and Moynihan left the administration.

By the 1980s, the report had reemerged as being prescient and evidence the policies of the 1960s were a failure.

As President Ronald Reagan in January 1988 asserted, "The federal government declared war on poverty and poverty won."

Conservatives in the 1960s argued social programs don't help the poor and the problems of blacks are of their own making to be fixed by them.

With the end of legal Jim Crow, the responsibility and fault belongs to them. By the 1980s conservatives asserted Moynihan was right - the issue is the black family, not systemic discrimination.

The Moynihan Report and its receipt cannot be understood in a vacuum. It was leaked one year after the rise of Barry Goldwater and the conservative takeover of the Republican Party.

It followed the summer riots of 1964 and preceded the urban riots of 1965-68.

The Civil Rights Movement was beginning to shift away from the philosophy of Dr. Martin Luther King to a more militant approach.

Lastly, white fear of black crime and its link to civil rights was forming.

The politics of the middle 1960s had distorted receipt of the report.

The issues raised by the Moynihan Report are just as relevant in 2015 as they were in 1965.

Accordingly, on March 18, Kutztown University will host a forum on the history and meaning of the report.

The forum, The Moynihan Report: Fifty Years Later: A Social, Political & Historical Forum, is open to the public and is being presented by the Kutztown University Commission on the Status of Minorities.

The forum will be held 8:30 a.m. to 3:45 p.m. in 183 of the McFarland Student Union Building

Additional information can be found on the Commission Web page www2. kutztown.edu/about-ku/administration/university-senate/committees/commission-on-the-status-of-minorities.