Few policy papers in American history have stirred more controversy than The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, otherwise known as the Moynihan Report. Drafted as an internal memo by a young assistant secretary of labor named Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1965, the report threw gasoline on the highly flammable race question in the United States, blaming racial inequality on black illegitimacy and divorce. Convinced that the civil rights movement had vanquished formal inequality, Moynihan focused on the matriarchal black family as the primary impediment to black success.