The concept of benign neglect was coined by the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) in a January 1970 memo to President Richard M. Nixon while he served as the latter’s Urban Affairs counselor. The widely circulated memo, which was leaked to the press in March of that same year, read: “The time may have come when the issue of race could benefit from a period of ‘benign neglect’.” At that historical juncture, Moynihan declared, Americans needed “a period in which Negro progress” continued and “racial rhetoric” faded.