The black family actually survived slavery and segregation fairly well. It was when the welfare state came and replaced the responsibility of the families (especially the fathers) to support and raise the kids with the government that everything fell apart. Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams have written extensively on this. The blame goes to FDR, LBJ and the poverty pimps running the modern civil rights movement.
Predominantly LBJ and his "Great Society" program.Ask yourself, how could government create a "great society" without first being "great" itself? Clearly, LBJ was actually promising a "great government." But if he had put it that way, I hope even liberalism-besotted Democrats of 1964 would have smelled a rat; saying "society" when you mean "government" is an evasion of the meaning of "liberal" ideology.To Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell I would, in this context, add the book on the Great Society, Losing Ground. It shows the GreatLiberals always mean "government" when they say "society." It is so ingrained in the liberal "thought" pattern that they actually don't notice the difference between the two words. In fact of course, a government which totally subsumes society, which allows no difference between the two, is the dream of tyrants and slave masters. A program to merge the two is not a promise to society but a deadly threat to freedom.
SocietyCatastrophe in economic statistical charts. It marks, for example, the particular year that a statistically measurable portion of black teens made the fatal choice of a dole over the discipline of a job which would have made an important contribution to their community and to their own future. Without the Great Society, Al Sharpton would have become a rich used-car dealer, and the country would have been the better for it.Those statistics show that blacks would have been ahead of the game if the Great Society had never happened - and if you look at successful Republican progams of subsequent years, they mostly have been retrenchments of the Great Society.