The Black family structure, or lack thereof, is debated frequently, particularly as the dynamics of the traditional family change to meet the wants and needs of society. The nuclear family is the most conventional in the United States, consisting of a mother, father, and children. If you throw in the wife at a home-keeping house, the children attending a safe suburban school, and a husband earning enough money home to buy the white picket fence to surround a two-story colonial, according to America, the dream has been met. There were unimaginable roadblocks ahead of a massive population of newly freed people who had endured incredible roadblocks all their lives.

I’m talking about newly freed slaves, who would be known as Negroes by the time the infamous report: The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, was written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1965. The Assistant Secretary of Labor during Lydon B. Johnson or LBJ’s presidency, Moynihan, argued that the decline of the Black nuclear family would impede blacks’ progress toward economic and social equality (Gregory Acs, Kenneth Braswell, Elaine Sorensen, and Margery Austin Turner, 2013). Along with observations and more predictions, the secretary warned that the lack of patriarchy and the rise of matriarchy within the family unit would be the demise of the Black family.

Fifty years later, people are still referencing the Moynihan Report because there has been a significant increase in Black children raised by mothers in single-parent homes. Under watchful eyes, Black Americans have always been the targeted demographic when observing a shift in untraditional trends that somebody may consider untoward in American society. The rise of single motherhood has not been a missed opportunity, and those determined to keep The Report relevant and preserve Moynihan’s prophecy are relentless. One of the top discussions is the dramatic increase in children born out of wedlock.

For example, Larry Elder, former opponent to California Governor Gavin Newsom, is no stranger to denouncing welfare. Elder is insistent that the fatherless homes caused by LBJ and The Great Society are the primary contributors to the demise of a strong Black family structure. For example, in a 2013 Washington Examiner article, Elder wrote:

by the ’60s, government workers went door-to-door in urban communities and elsewhere urging unmarried mothers to sign up for benefits, thus “marrying” the government. Almost 75 percent of today’s black children are born outside of wedlock, as are 53 percent of Hispanics and 29 percent of non-Hispanic whites. As recently as 1963 — five decades ago — those numbers for blacks were 23.6 percent. As for whites at that time, fewer than 3 percent were born outside of wedlock.

The statistics are accurate, but there are no records of government officials preying on the slums of America in the early 60s or beyond.

Nor are there records of welfare caseworkers promising unmarried mothers who could barely feed their children, deciding that marrying Uncle Sam paid more than wholly matrimony with her children’s Black father. The reality was opposite to what Elder and others claim had occurred during the last century when considering welfare and Black families. At the inception of welfare programs, first reported after the Civil War, officials excluded Black people from all receiving any benefits. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities or CBPP (2022), a 1931 study found fewer than 0.1 percent of children aided by mothers’ pension programs had unwed mothers.

But not worrying about Black women receiving welfare benefits does not seem popular to most, then or now. What is unpopular is a discussion about other factors that may have driven the increase in unwed Black mothers allegedly stampeding their local welfare offices for the abundance of cash at their disposal. After all, Black people, new to legal marriage and living in a quasi-nuclear family structure for the first time for many without fear of being forever separated from loved ones, deserved some government assistance. Right?

Black communities faced deep ongoing poverty due in part to the structural racism and sexism in the labor market that severely limited Black women’s employment prospects and depressed their wages (CBPP, 2022). Yet, over 100 years after Emancipation, people continued complaining about Black women receiving welfare that was not only needed but deserved, considering the low wages that Black women earned because better-paying jobs were unattainable. There’s so much to discuss within the words expressed in the Moynihan Report that it should not be a shock that it remains one of the most debatable works over 50 years since the leak. The controversy that many like to claim surrounds the document is not so controversial once people start at the beginning of Black Family life and not Black family life beginning in 1965.

Yes, there has been an increase in out-of-wedlock births in the Black community, but that statistic is accurate in almost every demographic. Before we believe the wives’ tale, we must examine the wives and the tale. Is it believable that a society of women would trade husbands and fathers of their children in for a few dollars and complete government control over their lives? It doesn’t make sense, meaning the wives are telling lies; there’s more to the tale or both.