This is an adapted excerpt from Delano Squires’ new book “The Vanishing Black Family: How Welfare and Feminism Made Marriage Optional and Children Vulnerable,” out June 16 from Sentinel.
“Raise your hand if you’re married.” This was the opening line in a 1986 CBS documentary on black families in Newark, New Jersey.
Bill Moyers, the journalist who narrated the television special, asked this question to about ten young black mothers sitting in a semicircle. None of the women raised their hands. He continued by asking how many of the mothers would like to be married to the father of their child. One hand went up.
Moyers, clearly seeking to understand the women, asked “Don’t you think you might need help in raising that baby from a man?”
One mother spoke up, and the camera shot also included her baby. The child—who appeared to be a little boy not quite two—looked up at his mother as Moyers asked the question. He was too young to understand his mother’s answer, but the viewers certainly could. “Not really,” she said. “I didn’t have a father.”
You could see how her experience growing up without a father influenced her ultimate conclusion: “Male figures are not substantially important in the family.”
That documentary, “The Vanishing Family: Crisis in Black America,” took an honest look at the breakdown of the traditional family structure in the inner city. Many of the mothers interviewed for the program were on welfare. One of the fathers said providing for his children was the responsibility of their mothers and the government.
According to Moyers, “In cities all over America the traditional family no longer exists. It has vanished and something new is taking its place. Single women and the children they’re rearing alone are the fastest growing part of the black population.”