The marriage culture and family structure that long sustained the black community continues to become a thing of the past.
T he most consequential analysis of the black family over the past century was published 60 years ago this month. The Moynihan report was written in 1965 and published while Daniel Patrick Moynihan served as assistant secretary of labor under President Lyndon Johnson.
The report, formally titled “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” is best known for its warnings about the breakdown of the black family. But Moynihan’s motivation for writing it was his concern that the gains in civil rights for black Americans — punctuated by the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — would not translate into social equality.
Moynihan believed the “racist virus in the American blood stream” would hinder the upward trajectory of blacks for at least another generation. But it was his second reason that made his report so polarizing when it was published — and for decades to come.
Despite black gains in education and income, Moynihan said, racial disparities were widening because of the disintegration of the two-parent family among inner city blacks. He pointed to several indicators to justify his views, including a nonmarital birth rate that rose from 16.8 percent in 1940 to 23.6 percent in 1963.
Middle-class blacks were doing well, Moynihan acknowledged, but “for vast numbers of the unskilled, poorly educated city working class, the fabric of conventional social relationships has all but disintegrated,” he wrote.
The picture Moynihan painted was clear. The black family — as an institution — was in the early stages of disintegrating, and failure to address the issue would create a cycle of poverty and disadvantage that would perpetuate itself for generations.
His warning has proven prophetic.
In just three generations, black children being born to — and raised by — married parents went from being the norm to the exception. In 1967, the poverty rate for blacks was about 40 percent and the median household income was roughly $30,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars. Despite those challenging economic circumstances, three in four black children were born to married parents.
By 2022, the poverty rate had decreased to 17 percent, but the non-marital birth rate had increased to 70 percent, which was significantly higher than the rates for whites (27 percent) and Asians (13 percent).
The relationship between parents before the birth of a baby is a preview to a child’s home life. According to the 1960 Census, two-thirds of black children lived in two-parent homes. Today, 45 percent live with a single mother.
This reality should prompt civil rights organizations, policymakers, and journalists to ask a simple question: “If life has generally gotten better for blacks in America over the last 60 years, why has the state of the family gotten worse?”
The answer reveals a simple yet inconvenient truth. Only 33 percent of black adults are married, compared with 48 percent of Hispanics, 57 percent of whites, and 63 percent of Asians. The traditional black family is vanishing because marriage has disappeared, especially in low-income and working-class neighborhoods.
Understanding the forces that divided the home is key to forging a path forward. A perfect storm of government policy and shifting cultural norms in the 1960s had a devastating effect on the family structure in black America. In 1950, total federal expenditures on public aid programs, a fraction of total social welfare spending, totaled $1.1 billion. By 1975, this spending had ballooned to $27 billion, and it topped $60 billion by 1985.
At the same time, the rise of second-wave feminism made women reconsider their position in society and roles in the home. Black feminists writing at the time wanted to see women pursuing higher education and filling the roles they believed were needed to wage a revolution. In their words, black women “sitting at home reading bedtime stories to their children are just not going to make it.”
Destabilizing the home and making both sexes reconsider their relationship with each another and their children set the stage for a parallel family structure that established the government as the de facto head of household for millions of low-income women.
In 1972, Johnnie Tillmon, a leader within the National Welfare Rights Organization, wrote an essay in Ms. magazine describing this relationship: “Welfare is like a super-sexist marriage. You trade in a man for the man. But you can’t divorce him if he treats you bad.”
Rebuilding the black family requires a new call for national action but one with a very different audience than in 1965. This is an issue that black leaders, not white liberals, must make a national priority. It will require an all-hands-on-deck effort from black churches, HBCUs, elected officials, entertainers, business leaders, civil rights organizations, social commentators, and media outlets.
Churches running “spouse schools” for young couples, cities doing public awareness campaigns promoting family life, and scholars publishing best practices on strengthening marriage are all small but important steps to restoring a marriage culture in neighborhoods where one has not existed for decades.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan raised concerns about the black family at a time when two-parent households were still the norm. Black leaders today cannot afford to remain silent as the marriage culture and family structure that sustained the community from the end of the Civil War through the civil rights movement continues to become a thing of the past.