Way too complicated of an issue to explain in a forum post, but those dates match up very well with the Great Migration. In the early 20th century, practically all African-Americans still lived in the South - in intact families. They started moving northward during WW1 but it didn't really pick up until after WWII, so in 1938 most of today's Northern "Chocolate" cities were less than 5% Black. Being so poor that most of them had to save for a year to buy a train ticket, most left their families behind and roomed with a relative or somebody from their town in tenement apartments - that had been subdivided into even smaller apartments after the Italians and Poles moved out - until they could find a job as a maid or a pig slaughterer or whatever menial job that a country Negro with an eighth-grade education could come up with and they could rent their own room. Some eventually brought their families, some didn't. So, yes, there was probably a lot of hanky-panky going on.ventura wrote: ↑Sun Oct 11, 2020 2:58 pm "According to the 1938 Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, that year only 11 percent of black children were born to unwed mothers. As late as 1950, female-headed households constituted only 18 percent of the black population. Today it’s close to 70 percent."
To say that this is because of systemic racism in, for example, real estate, is like saying let's fix the roof when the entire ground floor is in flames. The tattered state of the black family unit is THE fundamental problem. No one seems to know about it?
Add a few million more people in the same confined ghetto and add to that public assistance programs that required that the father not be part of the household (even if he actually was) and you have a recipe for a high percentage of female-headed households, regardless of race. Add housing, job and credit discrimination and you get a vicious circle that still hasn't really been completely broken. Johnson (yes, he probably did say that) tried with his War On Poverty but in the inner city, most of the successes were that it allowed the people lucky enough to be working in the programs to move to a nicer part of the ghetto, or after the NAACP and the ACLU sued to allow it, some were able to move to the near-in suburbs like Cicero, Compton and Newark. But it didn't do squat for the inner city and in many cases, it just let it expand its borders.
But with almost anything you can blame for the African-American condition in this country ask, "Why is that?" - sometimes you might have to ask it two or three times. Nine times out of ten, you'll land on racism in one form or another. Sometimes it will be overt, sometimes it will simply be historical ignorance, but it'll be there. Which is why I think it's a great idea to teach ethnic studies (of all ethnicities, even white) in high schools. There's just too many things we don't know about each other.
](./images/smilies/eusa_wall.gif "Brick wall"){kind=small}
