Graph for the Day for November 24, 2010

By Janice Shaw Crouse

Collateral Damage of the War on Poverty

"Nowhere was the effect of the white liberalism of the 1960s on the social evolution of black culture more devastating than in the disintegration of the black family. ...

"White liberals, instead of comparing what has happened to the black family since the liberal welfare state polices of the 1960s were put into practice, compare black families to white families and conclude that the higher rates of broken homes and unwed motherhood among blacks are due to ‘a legacy of slavery.' But why the large-scale disintegration of the black family should have begun a hundred years after slavery is left unexplained. ... [I]t is clear that broken homes were far more common among blacks at the end of the twentieth century than they were in the middle of that century or at the beginning of that century."[1]

- Thomas Sowell (Hoover Institution, Stanford University)

Index of Change in Black Female Marital Status - 1960 & 2010:

Decrease in percent of married black females, 1960 to 2010: 28 percentage points
Increase in percent of never-married black females, 1960 to 2010: 38 percentage points
Decrease in percent of divorced, widowed & separated, 1960 to 2010: 9 percentage points

[1] Thomas Sowell, "Black Rednecks and White Liberals," (Encounter Books: New York, NY, 2005), pp. 34-35.

Janice Shaw Crouse, Ph.D., author of "Children at Risk" (Transaction, 2010), is Senior Fellow at the Beverly LaHaye Institute, Concerned Women for America.