Just a little over a week after President Joe Biden, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), and the New York Times attacked Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) for suggesting it was the Great Society and not Jim Crow that broke up the black family, comedian Larry Wilmore essentially sided with Donalds.

“A lot of those programs did break down the black family in this way: In order to qualify for welfare, the man couldn’t be in the house. That was insidious to me,” Wilmore told fellow comedian Bill Maher on Maher’s Club Random podcast. 

“And so a lot of black families were broken up because if you were poor and destitute, and you needed the money, the man couldn’t be in the house,” Wilmore continued. “So, why are you going to be married? And that happened from the ’60s on.”

“But who passed that law?” Maher then asked.

“That was the Great Society,” Wilmore responded.

The entire exchange takes detours through Jerry Lewis and O.J. Simpson and is worth watching, but as much as Wilmore gets right, he gets a couple of things wrong.

So-called “man in the house” rules were not enacted as part of the Great Society. The very first Aid to Dependent Children program, passed as part of the Social Security Act of 1935, allowed states to impose eligibility requirements relating to the “moral character” of applicants, which many states used to deny benefits to children born outside of marriage (Congress would later change the name to Aid to Families with Dependent Children in 1962).

It was this “moral character” language that many states used to justify “man in the house” rules, which allowed caseworkers to deny a mother eligibility if an unrelated adult male was found to be living in her home.

That all changed in 1968 when the Supreme Court held in King v. Smith that “man in the house” rules unduly punished children. Alabama had argued in court that without “man in the house” rules, those couples who did get married would be discriminated against because they would no longer qualify for the program, while couples who lived together but did not marry could continue receiving benefits.

And that is exactly what happened. As late as 1950, young black women were more likely to be married, at 65.7%, than young white women, at 65.6%. That started to change as ADC grew in popularity, but “man in the house” rules still incentivized many young couples to get married.

By 1970, the percentage of young white women who were married held steady at 65%, while the percentage of young black women who were married had ticked down to 56%. 

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But then, in the first full decade after King v. Smith, after the Supreme Court allowed cohabiting couples to receive welfare benefits but not married couples, that is when the black family collapsed. By 1980, the percentage of young black women who were married had fallen to just 22%, and it has never recovered. 

So, Wilmore is correct that Great Society programs, including AFDC, Medicaid, food stamps, and Section 8 housing, are largely to blame for the breakup of the black family. But it was not “man in the house” rules that did the damage. “Man in the house” rules were invalidated by the Supreme Court in 1968. Instead, it was the marriage penalties embedded in these means-tested programs that created an incentive for poor black couples not to get married.