In a 1989 interview on ABC's Nightline, filmmaker Spike Lee — whose breakout movie, Do the Right Thing, had just made him an overnight celebrity — reflected on how his childhood in Brooklyn influenced his later professional success.

"I would have really liked to focus more on the black family because I remember when I was growing up, both my parents were home," he said. "When my friends would come over, they were amazed that both my parents lived with us. We were thought of as Martians. It was something so foreign to them. I think the reason why I'm able to do what I'm doing today is because I had both my parents there to raise me. And that makes a difference."²

Denzel Washington and Spike Lee, both black cultural icons born in the mid-1950s, point to the traditional nuclear family — one that is headed by both a father and a mother — as essential to the development of children into responsible adults.

It's now painfully apparent that the decline of the traditional family in the black community — notably the absence of the father in too many homes — presents a clear and present danger to black America in particular and also to America as a whole. It's a downward trend crying out for reversal.

"To put it simply, the traditional black family is on the brink of extinction because having babies without wedlock and raising children without a father in the home have become acceptable norms independent of the factors that started this trend 60 years ago," asserts Project 21 ambassador Delano Squires, a former Washington, D.C. city executive.³

But the breakdown of the family unit actually began years ago as part of an agenda by malevolent forces to tear apart Western civilization. In The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848,

"The harsh realities of slavery created incentives for black men and women to keep their families together," Squires notes. "In fact, former slaves sometimes traveled across the country to put their families back together. From the 1890s through the 1950s, black men and women married earlier and were more likely to be married by 35 than their white peers."¹⁰

Despite the persistence of legalized segregation in the South until the mid-1960s, and the social disruptions caused by the migration of some six million black Americans from the rural South to cities in the Northeast, Midwest and Far West from the 1910s to early 1970s, the black nuclear family held up remarkably well through most of this turbulent period.

Indeed, the 1960 Census revealed that two-thirds of black children lived in two-parent households, even though the poverty rate among black Americans stood at an alarming 55 percent in 1959.¹¹ Times were certainly hard for most black Americans of that era, yet the traditional nuclear family structure was still the norm.

"From 1890 to 1950, black women had a higher marriage rate than white women," noted legal and financial commentator Willis Krumholz in a paper for the Institute for Family Studies. "And in 1950, just nine percent of black children lived without their father. By 1960, the black marriage rate had declined but remained close to the white marriage rate. In other words, despite open racism and widespread poverty, strong black families used to be the norm."¹²

That stability of the black nuclear family, and hence the role of fathers therein, was reinforced by strong black churches. "As the only stable and coherent institution to emerge from slavery, black churches were not only dominant in their communities, but they also became the womb of black culture and a number of major social institutions," noted religious scholars C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya in their book The Black Church in the African American Experience.¹³

The undoing of the traditional intact black family, and the myriad social pathologies — drugs, crime, truancy and the stifling of upward social mobility — that flowed therefrom, is rooted in the

vast expansion of the Great Society's welfare programs. "Cash welfare in meager form existed since 1935, and some welfare expansion took place during the Kennedy Administration," Krumholz points out. "But under Johnson's Great Society, which began in 1964, benefits became substantially more generous and came under greater control of the federal government."¹⁴

Harvard University's Paul Peterson notes that "some programs actively discouraged marriage" because "welfare assistance went to mothers so long as no male was boarding in the household… Marriage to an employed male, even one earning the minimum wage, placed at risk a mother's economic well-being."¹⁵

Krumholz additionally points out that "[i]nfamous 'man in the house' rules meant that welfare workers would randomly appear in homes to check and see if the mother was accurately reporting her family status."¹⁶

The benefits that single women received were quite generous, provided adult males — including the fathers of their children — were absent from the household. According to Peterson, it's "estimated that in 1975 a household head would have to earn $20,000 a year to have more resources than could be obtained from Great Society programs."¹⁷ That equates to about $120,400 in annual earnings in 2020s dollars.¹⁸

As Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley has noted, "the government paid mothers to keep fathers out of the household – and paid them well."¹⁹

Even though the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously struck down the "man-in-the-house" rule in 1968's King v. Smith, that ruling had little effect on anti-poverty bureaucrats who continued to funnel funds to female-headed households.

The expanding welfare state, which in addition to cash payments also included food stamps and Medicaid, all but erased the traditional role of a husband/father as the chief provider for his family. The federal government, primarily through the Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, became the de facto breadwinner for poor families.

"The racial demographics of these programs were striking," Squires observes. "Despite being only 12 percent of the population in 1985, 42 percent of AFDC families were black. This was hardly a surprise given that the poverty rate for black female-headed families with children under 18 was 59 percent."²⁰

The disintegration of the black nuclear family, particularly the absence of the father, gathered steam as Great Society programs tightened their grip on black communities. In dismantling the structure of the black family, Great Society bureaucrats and the politicians who supported and enabled them assaulted the one institution best suited to withstand the pressure of social engineering.

Writing for the American Enterprise Institute in 2021, social critic Thomas Chatterton Williams paid homage to economist Thomas Sowell's keen insight into the role the family plays in thwarting the schemes of social engineers:

In his 1995 book, The Vision of the Anointed, Sowell argues persuasively that, "The family is inherently an obstacle to the schemes for central control of social processes.

Union's Lenin Peace Prize) and Ms. magazine editor Alice Walker viewed the nuclear family as a relic of capitalist exploitation and urged women to liberate themselves from being dependent on men.

The combined effect of Great Society programs and feminist ideology — the former difficult to eradicate once the programs became entrenched in myriad bureaucracies, the latter repeated endlessly in the media, educational institutions and popular culture — contributed mightily to the decline of fathers' roles in the black family. "On the one side was the government that displaced men from their traditional role as providers and protectors," Squires notes. "On the other was the feminist movement that pushed women to seek financial independence and see a man in the home as unnecessary."²²

Higher rates of absent fathers in black households, compared with white and Hispanic families, appear to still be hobbling social mobility among black Americans. "Between 2012 and 2022, the percentage of Hispanic households in the country that qualified as middle-class grew from about 42 percent to 48 percent," the Pew Charitable Trust's Stateline news service reported in December 2023. "The proportion of black middle-class households grew more slowly, from 41 percent to 44 percent."²³

On July 4, 2025, President Donald Trump signed the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" into law, which, among other things, denied Planned Parenthood and affiliated organizations federal Medicaid funding if they continued to provide abortions. The cut in federal funding led to the closure of 45 Planned Parenthood facilities by the end of November 2025.⁵⁶ Recognizing the dire threat caused by cuts in federal funding, abortion advocates are suing to have the provision overturned.

One of the most disturbing trends in a sphere of what is sometimes referred to as "reproductive rights" is the expanding war on the nation's roughly 2,600 pregnancy resource centers. These mostly nonprofit centers provide medical support to predominantly low-income women to help them bring their babies to term. The pregnancy centers are the exact opposite of abortion clinics, incurring the wrath of so-called "pro-choice" advocates. "According to a tally by the Family Research Council, more than 100 of these centers, pro-life organizations, and churches were attacked with arson, firebombing and vandalism after the May 2022 leak of the ruling that reversed Roe v. Wade," wrote Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker.⁵⁷

The campaign against pregnancy centers extends to medical journals and to the courtroom. Parker cited an article in the American Medical Association's Journal of Ethics by two University of North Carolina physicians who wrote: "Although crisis pregnancy centers enjoy First Amendment rights protection, their propagation of misinformation should be regarded as an ethical violation that undermines women's health." On Dec. 2, 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear a case brought by First Choice Women's Resource Centers Inc. against New Jersey Attorney General Mathew J. Platkin. Platkin had issued a subpoena against First Choice "demanding 10 years of confidential records, including donor, volunteer and staff information, without cause or evidence of wrongdoing," Parker reported. "Indeed, such centers have been offering life-affirming support to expectant mothers and families for decades."⁵⁸

A disproportionate percentage of low-income expectant mothers seeking support from pregnancy centers are no doubt black women. By demonizing pregnancy centers, elites have found another way to combat family formation, a subject of particular interest to black Americans. Restoring the black family – father, mother and children — is essential to the social mobility of black Americans. Allowing family formation to be thwarted under the guise of protecting women's health should be seen for what it is.

"Nearly seven million men in the prime of life — over a tenth of the 25-to-54 age group – are neither working nor looking for work these days," writes the American Enterprise Institute's Nicholas Eberstadt. "Today, for every 'prime-age' man who is actually unemployed — out of a job but looking — there are three who are neither working nor looking for work."⁶¹

Like the failed Great Society programs of the 1960s, UBI will result in making its recipients wards of the state — only in this case, that is the stated goal. And by eliminating all work requirements, it would — by making the government the household's breadwinner — all but erase the father's position as chief provider for his family. Indeed, the family as we know it would cease to exist.