Why do we need Black Marriage Day?

Published 1:12 pm Friday, March 20, 2009

As I write this, marriage advocates and leaders all over the country are gearing up for Black Marriage Day.

As someone who writes and speaks regularly on the importance of marriage and has worked for years to improve the health of marriages, I’ve been asked by a few people, “Why is there a Black Marriage Day? What about other ethnic groups? And why isn’t there a White Marriage Day?”

Those are fair questions that merit a response. But first, let’s take a look back.

In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a social scientist in the Johnson administration who later became a United States senator, authored a report now widely known as The Moynihan Report. In the report, Moynihan suggested that the deterioration of the black family was the primary cause of black poverty and suffering and would hinder political and economic equality for African Americans.

The report connected the dots, so to speak, between family fragmentation and the many social ills besetting the black family in the early sixties – poverty, crime and teen pregnancy, just to name a few.

In one of the report’s more pointed sections, Moynihan summarized why family “disorganization” on a broad scale undermines the health of families:

“Within the family, each new generation of young males learn the appropriate nurturing behavior and superimpose upon their biologically given maleness this learned parental role. When the family breaks down . . . this delicate line of transmission is broken.”

(That echoes the enduring words of anthropologist Margaret Mead who asserted that the supreme test of any society is whether it can teach its men to be fathers.)

At the time of its release, the report elicited some angry responses. Today, the report is widely regarded as approximating social science prophecy. William Julius Wilson, an esteemed sociologist at Harvard University, has labeled The Moynihan Report “a prophetic document.”

Moynihan’s warnings about what would happen if the trends of that day weren’t reversed have held true. Increasing rates of family fragmentation among African Americans have led to higher rates of social pathologies and suffering among black families.

Now, take a deep breath and consider this: In 1965, Moynihan sounded the alarm over the scandalous reality that one in four black babies were being born to unwed mothers. Today that number is just shy of three in four.

I realize this is basic math, but I think it’s worth attaching some large numbers to those percentages – for every 100,000 black babies born in the United States, 75,000 will be born into a home where there is no father. As Kay Hymowitz points out, the single moms who bear these children “are far more likely than married mothers to be poor, even after a post-welfare-reform decline in child poverty. They are also more likely to pass that poverty on to their children.”

So, to answer the questions posed at the beginning of this column, we celebrate Black Marriage Day because, broadly speaking, the black family is suffering more than any other ethnic group in America. That fact, coupled with historic inequities in areas like education and employment, necessitates a unique and dedicated approach to strengthening black marriage.

Should we have a marriage day for others? Absolutely.

Remember, Moynihan was troubled by an unwed birthrate of 25 percent in the black community in 1965. Just this week, it was reported that the unwed childbearing rate nationwide, regardless of race, is now 40 percent! Stating the obvious, unwed childbearing is not a race problem; it’s a human problem.

Let me clear, nothing here should be construed to mean that all children of single parents are destined for failure or that every single parent chose to raise a child on their own. Many single parents labor heroically and successfully to raise well-adjusted children who grow up to be responsible adults. However, good social science research tells us what is likely to happen given certain conditions and, in this case, the research shows that kids raised by single parents are more likely to experience various social, familial and economic problems.

But again, the need for marriage is especially acute in the African American community where 41 percent of African American adults are married as opposed to 60 percent of Hispanics and 69 percent of whites. Joy Jones, the author of “Marriage is for White People,” says that African American women comprise the segment of people in America least likely to marry.

There are many reasons for this, but the implications of black women and their children are disquieting. As Georgia Chief Justice Leah Sears stated in a talk she gave last year at Ebenezer Baptist Church, the church where Martin Luther King Jr. served as pastor, “Marriage is the most pro-child institution we have.”

She continued, “When society debates what children need in order to grow into healthy, happy, productive, well-adjusted adults, a lot of things are typically listed as essentials: access to healthcare, a good education, nutrition, jobs, safe neighborhoods. But often missing in the discussion is the very foundation from which all these things flow, and that is this: What’s most important to a child’s well-being is a stable family that can provide a child with love, guidance, financial support and security. And in most instances, the most stable families are those with married partners raising their own children. Yes, children do better with married parents together.”

The urgency is clear – marriage is a key predictor of human well-being and the common good and is, therefore, demanding attention in the African American community. But given the implications of the high rates of unwed childbearing nationwide, irrespective of race, a sense of urgency ought to animate us all.



Georgia Family Council is a non-profit research and education organization committed to fostering conditions in which individuals, families and communities thrive. For more information, go to www.georgiafamily.org, (770) 242-0001, stephen.daniels@georgiafamily.org.