[Uncle Miltie]

The Effect of the Decline of Marriage.
As this Report shows, this analysis found that the decline of marriage since the 1960s has been a substantial factor behind the current high levels of child poverty. Specifically, if marriage were restored to 1960s levels:

The number of children living in single-parent homes would be cut by nearly 60 percent. The number of children living in married couple families would increase by almost 11.5 million, and the number residing in single-parent homes would be reduced by a corresponding amount. These 11.5 million children represent 16.2 percent of all children.
Among the 11.5 million added children residing in married-couple homes in this scenario, the poverty rate would fall by 80.4 percent. Some 34.2 percent of these children are now poor and live in single-parent homes. If their parents were married to spouses with matching demographic characteristics, only 6.7 percent of these children would remain poor.
Overall, restoring marriage to 1960 levels would remove more than 3 million children from poverty nationwide. The U.S. child poverty rate would fall by nearly a third, from 15.7 percent to 11.2 percent.
The decline in marriage since the inception of the War on Poverty in the 1960s has clearly contributed to child poverty. Overall, our analysis shows that child poverty would be nearly a third lower today if the traditional two-parent family had not deteriorated over the past three decades.

Background
Before the War on Poverty began in the mid-1960s, traditional husband-wife families comprised the vast majority of families with children. Indeed, over 88 percent of all children resided in a married-couple family, according to data from the 1960 decennial Census of Population and Housing.4 By 2000, this demographic statistic had changed significantly: Around 72 percent of all children lived in married-couple families. In four decades, American family structure changed, and more than a tenth of all children shifted from two-parent to single-parent families.

More at: http://www.heritage.org/Research/Family/CDA02-04.cfm

[colorado tanker]

You are so on target, Brad. All good things, such as high school achievement, low out of wedlock births, middle class lifestyle, come from intact families with a father present. Until the brokenness of the black family and absence of black fathers is fixed, African-Americans will lag behind the mainstream.

If the civil rights "leadership" truly cared for African-Americans, they would focus like a laser beam on this, instead of incessantly whining about government programs and Republicans.