Blaming the Past
Only 40 percent of black children live in two-parent households. The illegitimacy rate among blacks stands close to 70 percent. The "legacy of slavery" explanation for today's weak black family structure loses all manner of credibility when one examines evidence from the past. Even during slavery, most black children lived in biological two-parent families. One study of nineteenth century slave families (Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom: 1750-1925) found that in up to three-fourths of the families, all the children had the same mother and father. In New York City, in 1925, 85 percent of kin-related black households were double-headed. In fact, "Five in six children under the age of six lived with both parents." Both during slavery and as late as 1920, a black teenage girl raising a child without a man was rare among blacks. Historian Herbert Gutman, also found in analyzing data on black families in Harlem between 1905 and 1925, that only 3 percent of all families "were headed by a woman under thirty." Thomas Sowell found, "Going back a hundred years, when blacks were just one generation out of slavery, we find that census data of that era showed that a slightly higher percentage of black adults had married than white adults. This fact remained true in every census from 1890 to 1940."
Walter E. Williams
