On History Class and Fatherlessness

I’m hearing a lot about what people learned and did not learn in History class. Since I love history, this newfound passion for knowledge is exciting. I’m thankful that I had history teachers who cared very much about teaching truths in regard to slavery and Jim Crow, although I don’t really remember a lot of my fellow students paying much attention, which is understandable since history is not generally one of the priorities of teenage life. Even with good teachers, one can’t learn everything there is to know in history classes. One question that I had to research on my own was, “Why is the inner-city the way it is?” I’d like to explore that.

After the Civil War, during Reconstruction (1865 - 1877), blacks made considerable economic, social, and political gains in the South. When federal troops left the South and Southern Democrats regained control, they enacted Jim Crow laws (Google to learn more), which suppressed black voting and made upward mobility nearly impossible. In addition, hate groups such as the KKK terrorized black citizens.

As European immigration slowed, leaving an opening for factory workers in the North, black Southerners began a migratory pattern that would last over fifty years, called The Great Migration. Before this era, 90% of all blacks in the U.S. lived in the South. By the end, that number was cut to less than 50%.

Despite continued instances of racism, life in the North was considerably better for most blacks prior to the Great Depression. Google “Harlem Renaissance” to get a taste of this time period.

The Great Depression dealt a heavy blow to all Americans, but as the country recovered, blacks continued their exodus from the South. In the 1930s, under The New Deal, the federal government set out to solve the problem of housing shortages, which was increasingly a problem in growing cities. But these practices had racial bias. The practice of “redlining,” created segregated neighborhoods in the North and perpetuated “white flight” from city centers to the suburbs.

As the Great Migration continued, Northern blacks were not always thrilled about the influx of often uneducated, rural-born Southern blacks. These new neighbors generally had larger families and different cultural practices that Northern blacks found backward. In J.D. Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy, he writes of a similar phenomenon when “hillbilly” whites from Kentucky migrated to Ohio to find factory work - native Ohioans found their new neighbors’ standards of living repugnant (chickens running around in the yard and so forth). Many Northern blacks, who tended to be more upwardly mobile, moved to different neighborhoods as they were able. This caused majority black neighborhoods to become increasingly poor.

In the 1950s, many government leaders, in cities such as St. Louis, decided it would be in the best interest of blacks to demolish their neighborhoods (which they deemed slums) and build large apartment complexes where they could live. "The Pruitt-Igoe Myth" is a great documentary I saw on PBS about this. Whether the demolished neighborhoods (where blacks owned most of the properties vs. the apartments that were owned by the government) were indeed slums, or whether this was the judgment of Northern whites whose expectations for living standards were different than blacks who grew up in the rural South, is up for debate.

The basic idea for the housing projects was that the government would build the buildings, but the tenants’ rents would maintain them. Initially, residents reported that these were wonderful homes, but that sentiment was short-lived. As with white residents of similar housing projects, upwardly mobile blacks chose to move to their own homes when they were financially able. This made the housing projects increasingly poor as time went on and more people were able to use them as a stepping stone. In addition, economic downturn and mass layoffs due to automation contributed to the inability of increasingly poor tenants to pay the rents necessary to keep up the buildings. Living conditions began to go down and residents had little control of the deteriorating situation. Crime and violence increased.

One of the major downsides of public housing that did not exist in the black neighborhoods that came before, was the incentivization of single-parent households. Preferences were given to single-parent households in an attempt to help those the government felt were most in need. In reality, this caused many fathers who wanted their families to be able to live in the safe, clean environments promised by the housing projects, to leave their families and adopt a nomadic lifestyle. They did this in order to avoid inspectors who would evict them if they found a man living in the home. As a result, a new generation of poor blacks was raised in an increasingly dysfunctional family structure, which became the “norm” for many who perpetuated this into the following generations. Even during slavery and Jim Crow, most black children were raised with both parents in the home. Public housing managed to weaken the black family in a way that these other institutions were never able to, all in the attempt to fix black problems as perceived by those who did not live in black neighborhoods.

Fatherlessness is one of the biggest contributors to poverty and crime in our nation, regardless of race. If you have agreed with leaders such as Barack Obama, who have championed this cause, you should probably be concerned that one of the goals of Black Lives Matter is to “disrupt the Western prescribed nuclear family structure requirement.” Many believe that this disruption has already caused far too much harm to black lives.

If you want to learn more about these issues, I would suggest watching The Pruitt-Igoe Myth on Amazon and then reading this article for a slightly different perspective on causes.

This is a great NPR Article and Thomas Sowell, my favorite economist, has also written extensively about this issue.

Sources:

https://www.city-journal.org/html/myths-pruitt-igoe-myth-9698.html

https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history-of-how-the-u-s-government-segregated-america

https://nypost.com/2020/09/24/blm-removes-website-language-blasting-nuclear-family-structure/