Black unwed birth rate hits 70% as family structure erodes

The share of black children born to married parents collapsed to 30% from 70% in the six decades since the war on poverty began, a new book argues.

A Wall Street Journal column by Jason Riley argues that six decades of welfare-state expansion, not the legacy of slavery, drove the collapse of the black family — with 70% of black children now born to unwed parents, compared with 30% in 1965.

"The black family was more intact after three centuries of chattel slavery than after three generations of the federal government's war on poverty," Delano Squires, a Heritage Foundation fellow and author of "The Vanishing Black Family," wrote, according to the column.

Between 1890 and 1950, black men and women married earlier and were more likely to be married by age 35 than their white peers, Squires wrote. Today, nearly 45% of black children live with a single mother. Asians have the highest marriage rates and incomes among racial groups, followed by whites, Hispanics and blacks — a correlation Squires said is no coincidence.

The debate carries implications for fiscal policy as socialist candidates — who won primaries in Colorado, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Georgia and are on ballots in Florida, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin — push for expanded welfare programs that Squires and Riley said weaken the two-parent family structure that correlates with higher educational attainment and lower poverty rates.

The column, published July 8, cites Squires' research showing that following emancipation, one of the first priorities for formerly enslaved people was reuniting with spouses and children. A project called "Last Seen: Finding Families After Slavery" has compiled thousands of newspaper advertisements placed between the 1830s and 1920s by former slaves searching for loved ones — evidence, Squires argued, that the nuclear family was a deeply held value, not a tool of oppression as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels described it.

Marx and Engels dismissed the traditional family as a patriarchal instrument that exploited women's domestic labor, according to the column. That thinking, Riley wrote, informs modern policymakers who view the state as the best provider and fathers as superfluous. The result is a system where preserving family autonomy is secondary to expanding central planning.

Squires, who spent more than a decade working in a District of Columbia gun-violence reduction program, argued that black religious leaders and communities — not white liberals — must drive the restoration of the black family. He contended that too many faith leaders have lost their way since the civil-rights era, when the black church played a central role in securing legislative victories in the 1950s and 1960s.

The broader political context adds urgency to the debate. Socialist candidates are no longer fringe figures confined to coastal cities. Zohran Mamdani's mayoral victory in New York over former Gov. Andrew Cuomo demonstrated the movement's electoral viability, and similar candidates have won congressional primaries in Colorado and Pennsylvania. Their platform — higher taxes on the wealthy to fund free daycare, health care, housing and college — directly expands the welfare state that Squires identified as a primary driver of family fragmentation.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.