Martin Luther King, Jr. on the Black Family

If the arc of history doesn’t bend toward the family, hopes for justice are doomed.

Washington Post columnist Colbert I. King, devoted his column marking Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday to a speech that Dr. King delivered in 1965 on “The Dignity of Family Life”, in which the civil rights champion quoted anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski:

The family, that is, the group consisting of mother, father and child, still remains the main educational agency of mankind. Modern psychologists agree that parenthood as the dominant influence of infancy forms the character of the individual and at the same time shapes his social attitudes and thus places its imprint upon the constitution of the whole society.

Said Dr. King:

I endorse these conclusions and would emphasize one in particular. Family life not only educates in general but its quality ultimately determines the individual’s capacity to love. The institution of the family is decisive in determining not only if a person has the capacity to love another individual but in the larger social sense whether he is capable of loving his fellow men collectively. The whole of society rests on this foundation for stability, understanding and social peace.

The Moynihan Report had been published earlier that year. Dr. King found its data troubling. The report, he said –

offers the alarming conclusion that the Negro family in urban ghettos is crumbling and disintegrating. It suggests that the progress in civil rights can be negated by the dissolving of family structure and therefore social justice and tranquility can be delayed for generations. The statistics are alarming. They show that in urban cities nearly 25% of Negro women, who were married, are divorced, in contrast to a rate of 8% among whites. The rate of illegitimacy in the past twenty years rose slightly more for whites than Negroes, but the number of Negro illegitimacies in proportion to its population is substantially higher than whites [3% for whites/24% for blacks]. The number of Negro families headed by women is 2½ times that of whites and as a consequence 14% of all Negro children receive aid to dependent children and 56% of Negro children at some point in their lives have been recipients of public aid.

Those numbers are much worse today, belying the speaker’s essential optimism. Although “The Negro family is scarred,” he said, “it is winning.” He believed that “fair opportunity for jobs, education, housing and access to culture” would remedy the “pervasive and persistent economic want” that he saw as the root of the problem.

There can be no real doubt that blacks’ “opportunity for jobs, education, housing and access to culture” are vastly improved over what they were in 1965, when Professor Moynihan wrote his report. Yet in 2018, the Centers for Disease Control found that just under 70 percent of black children were born to unmarried mothers. (For whites the illegitimacy rate was almost 30 percent, higher than the black rate in 1965 and a likely pointer to the future of the white family.) As one commentator on those figures says –

For all racial and ethnic groups combined, 39.6 percent of births in the United States were out-of-wedlock (incidentally, isn’t that appalling?). And there was as always a tremendous range among groups. For blacks, the number is 69.4 percent; for American Indians/Alaska Natives, 68.2 percent (Native Hawaiians/Other Pacific Islanders were at 50.4 percent); for Hispanics, 51.8 percent; for whites, 28.2 percent; and for Asian Americans, a paltry 11.7 percent.

So, we go from seven out of ten for African Americans, to one out of ten for Asian Americans; from a little less than three out of ten for whites, to a little more than five out of ten for Hispanics. As I say, a huge range, and one that more than anything else seems to fit quite precisely with how well the different groups are doing on whatever success metric you want to use.

But rather than encourage people to wait until they are married before having children – which is perceived by the Left as too religious and patriarchal – it’s much easier to talk about “institutionalized racism” and “white privilege” and “mass incarceration” and “implicit bias” and 1619, isn’t it?