In Black America; Ensuring Inequality with Donna L. Franklin

On Radio Network, the University of Texas at Austin, this is in Black America. You don't like to use the word under class because it's pejorative. It connotes the idea that nothing can be done to change it, that they're on the bottom, and nothing can change. But there is a group that experiences persistent poverty, that experiences social isolation and neighborhood of concentrated poverty, that have had multi-generational dependence on welfare that have been out of the workforce, that we call weak attachment to the workforce, and that it has not brought into the American dream in the way that you and I have. And so they're separate from us in that sense, and we've got to bring them in. Donna L. Franklin, former professor, school of social work, University of Southern California, an author of the book, Ensuring Any Quality, the structural transformation of the African American family, published by Oxford University Press.

According to some, there's a crisis in the American family, and this crisis has been particularly severe in the African American community. Black women are more likely than ever to bear children as teenagers to remain single and to raise their children in poverty, as a result of staggering number of African American children are growing up without fathers in the home and living in destitution. Franklin offers an in-depth account of the African American family, reviewing his history and development, and why marriage and family experiences of African Americans differ from those of whites. Franklin traces the evolution of the black family from slavery to the present, showing the cumulative effects of centuries of repressive social policies. I'm John L. Hanson Jr., and welcome to another edition of In Black America. On this week's program, Ensuring Any Quality, the structural transformation of the African American family with author Donna L. Franklin in Black America. In the 60s, the now-centered Daniel Patrick Moynihan, which worked in the Kennedy and Johnson

administration, discovered see all of these things were written about the black family but nobody was talking about the thin he released this controversial report about the black family. And he said at that time the 25% of the black families were headed by women. And he called black families matriarchal, and he said the black men needed to be taken away and the media taught how to be men, and it was so controversial that shortly after it, the report was released, the Watts riots broke out, and then the Newark riots, and all of these urban riots, and all of the problems in the 60s. So whites got so afraid of talking about the problems of the black family because all of these things happened after the report was written in. And I think it happened because not just because of the report, because a lot of other things that were festering and nobody was talking about. But nobody even did research on the black family. Whites were scared to do anything and talk about anything in the black family that would be considered negative. And so nobody talked about it.

And so when I went to the University of Chicago in 1982, I was working with the person who is now the poverty expert at Harvard, William Julius Wilson. And he said we've got to talk about these things, and that's what's burned out reports. So in the 70s, when the problems were escalating in the 60s and the 50s, nobody talks about them and nobody wrote about them, and that's why we're saying now we've got to talk about them. In our new book, Franklin Began's with a research account of the impact of slavery on the black family, finding that slavery not only caused extreme instability and suffering for families, but established a lasting pattern of poverty which made the economic advantages of marriage unattainable. She also provides a critique of the policies of the Freedon's Bureau in Reconstruction and demonstrate the mixed impact of the new pattern of sharecropping. Franklin does offer new approaches to solving the African-American family crisis. Not only does she recommend federal intervention to create new economic opportunity in urban ghettos, but also she stresses the importance of black self-help and proposes the plan of action.

In addition, Franklin outlines interventions that can stabilize and strengthen poor, mother-only families living in ghetto neighborhoods. Recently, in Black America, spoke with Donald L. Franklin. Everything we've tried to do to overcome the experience of slavery since we were emancipated in slaves has not worked for us. We went from slavery to a sharecropping system, and the Freedon's Bureau tried to then institute patriarchal authority in black men so that they would be the heads of their families, but because black women had had an experience of autonomy, more autonomy, at least autonomy from black men during slavery, they were unwilling to be subjugated by black men. And so that created the first tension that we see in black couples. And then we migrated north, which separated our families. Then black men never had the employment they had when they moved north that they had when they were south and worked on the farms and worked on the sharecropping systems. So it's just been one thing after another that has set us back.

And I chronicle this in my book. Could you give us a little bit more insight particularly starting in chapter one that has to deal with slavery and this impact? Yeah, what slavery did is to the slave owner. The black female was more valuable because she had more the children. And the black women who had the most value to the slave master was women who had the highest fertility rates and who started their childbearing careers the earliest. So the black man was indispensable. So remember because there were no legal marriages for slaves, the black man could be sold, the black family could be separated. So for 300 years when we were slave, there were no real bonds between black males and black females because at any point a slave owner could separate the families, he could have sex with the black men's wife and the black men could do nothing about it. So when we were free to slaves, we were trying to then come together as a unit, to come together as a family. But we've never really been able to do that effectively.

And currently African Americans have the lowest marriage rates, the highest divorce rates, the highest instances of domestic violence and spousal abuse. Black men kill more black women than any other group and black men kill more men have the highest homicide rates than any other group. So we have the highest homicides rates of killing each other, of beating each other, of divorcing each other, and we have very low marriage rates. And this can all be traced to slavery and everything that's happened to us since. And it's very scary. What do we tell our young people to help them understand that this is a vicious cycle and it's continually to raises ugly head? Well, it doesn't have to be that way, but the first thing we've got to do, and this is why I wrote my book, we've got to come out of denial. We've got to start talking about the problem, and we've got to believe that the cycle can be broken if we acknowledge and admit that it exists. But at this point in time, nobody's talking about it, and we all have our heads in the proverbial sand like the ostrich, you know, like the Peruvian ostrich, and we're not dealing with it.

And so my book is saying, we've got to talk about this, we've got to deal with it, we've got to tell our children that they can change it. We can change it, but we've started to start admitting that there's a problem, and that's what we're not doing. And what we do talk about it is the problem we act like it just exists among the black poor. It doesn't. It exists on all levels. Black professional women are as angry as black men as the black poor woman in the ghetto who's dealing with the drug dealers. You know, there's just a level of rage that we can see has been transmitted intergenerational. And we've got to start talking about that rage and why it exists. And the fact that it doesn't need to exist anymore, if we can start having a real dialogue about it. What affected the migration from a rule of lifestyle to a northern industrial lifestyle? Well, we had a belief, we are a people, you know, Jesse Jackson always says, keep hope alive. We always had hope that the system would give us what it rightfully owed us.

We went north because we thought the industrial revolution was in full force, and then we would get those jobs in industry, you know, an automobile industry and all of those industries. We were systematically kept out of those jobs because we had been a rural people and even when we were in Africa, we were a rural people. Industrial time, the tempo, all the way we worked in the fields when we were sharecroppers, the way we kept our families together. Industrial time is very different from that. You have a boss, you have somebody says you've got to be at work at eight. So even we were discriminated against, but even when we were given opportunities, it was very difficult for us to make the transition from the rural areas to the cities. But the other real issue that the cities did, there was a lot of vice and corruption. Remember, they didn't have open housing. We all were put in ghettos, so there was concentrated poverty for the first time in the way it didn't exist in the South. And all of these negative influences like gambling, advice, and prostitution came into those urban communities. And it was a breakdown of the communal institutions we had had in the South, which kept us together.

For example, in the South, if a young man got a young woman pregnant, he was universally condemned. Everyone said, this is your responsibility, you have an own your responsibility, and there were community ways that they dealt with guys who were irresponsible. When those same people came north, there was no community to deal with that. There were no communal institutions. And so when guys didn't own up to their responsibilities, they were going to get somebody else pregnant. And there wasn't even a network or a great find where they could say, you know, John Doe is an irresponsible young man. You should know that, and you should keep your daughters away from him, which is what would have happened in the South. So everything that kept us cohesive as a community and the sanctions we had in the South broke down when we moved north. In addition, the promise of jobs that we were to have never came through. So it separated families over and over and over again. And that's when we really see the high rates of adolescent childbearing, adolescent pregnancy that we see today.

That's when it started. That's when we start seeing a lot of father, absent families. I documented my book, How those rates went up. Charts are available. And you can see that as we migrated north, that's when the real breakdown happened. We had problems in the South, but nothing like we had when we migrated north in massive numbers. The maternalistic era. Yeah, the maternalistic era is about the social welfare policies and how they changed. Yes, that's that's chapter three. Yeah, when we first went with the first welfare programs come into place. And how did we deal with them initially? Initially, we were systematically denied welfare because only the mothers who had babies within marriages and had their husbands around could use welfare. Those were the mother pensions programs. So very few black women got welfare benefits initially. But finally, FDR signed the Social Security Act and we had AFDC as we know it today. It was first called ADC.

And when we had ADC, that's when we started seeing black mothers get welfare benefits for the first time. And we saw the rates grow over time. And now we see mothers, black mothers who have had intergenerational welfare dependence. And those are the ones we're worried about. And now the Clinton has signed a welfare reform bill that puts a limit on the number of years they can stay on welfare. Is this a disservice to African-American women of having them place off the roads after a certain period with no real job training or jobs available out there to them? Right, they will be hurt the most. And it's again because of our distinctive history. No ethnic or racial group in this country has had the history that we have. And if they had the history that we have, their poverty rates, their long term dependence on welfare would look just like ours. But because we are stigmatized by color, because we've never been able to assimilate like other immigrant groups who've come into this country. And because we've always been quarantined in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, which we call ghettos,

we had, now there are no jobs in the ghettos. And now there are no men in the ghettos. And now we have a drug industry in the ghettos, which is keeping our mothers addicted and our fathers addicted and everybody and in the criminal justice system. It's a crisis, a serious, serious crisis. What did World War II contribute to the continual downfall of the African-American family in this country? Well, again, it gave us a semblance of hope. What World War II did for the black woman? Is it got her out of the domestic work for the first time? When the men went to war, black and white women went into the workplace for the first time in large numbers. And when black women got real jobs for the first time and didn't have to work as domestics in white people's kitchens, and the sort of oppression that existed there, which was a continuity of slavery, after the war was over and those jobs disappeared, black women did not want to go back into domestic work. And they had sort of a resistance movement, if you will.

And that's when we see, and the marriage rates went up because black men had jobs for the first time, and so you see the marriage rates just soared among African-Americans. But after the war, when the men came back, and there were no jobs, and the women didn't have any jobs, and all of those opportunities were gone, the divorce rates soared, and they've never gone down since. Is it an unfair reality to put a black face on welfare in this country? Yes, in this sense, blacks are still not a majority of welfare recipients, but we are disproportionately unwelfered, and we are overrepresented in the welfare roles. We're right now about 49% of the welfare, on the welfare roles, but we're only 12% in the population. So you see, we are overrepresented in that sense. And we have the longest, we stay on, once we get on welfare, we stay on welfare longer than whites do. One of the reasons for that is, what we witnessed in the last 20 to 25 years is a disappearance of marriage among the poorest African-Americans.

So the way white women escape welfare and poverty is they can work, but they can also get married, and so can Hispanic women. When we looked at the data in Chicago, which is where we did our big study, we found that black women had much higher levels of education than the Hispanic women. Hispanic women dropped out of school at about eighth grade, ninth grade. Black women went through high school many times, they had one year of community college. But Hispanic women had higher household incomes, because they had a man in the house, and the black women do not have men in the house. So one of the reasons that we see the persistence of poverty is because the black men are not working. So when there was a erosion of job opportunities for black men, and as their unemployment rates soared, the marriage rates declined as well. Were there any, was there an upside to the African-American males and a military service? Yes, because they had a regular income, and the regular income, black women married them.

But the minute they lost that income, you know, what's the end of this, but for marriage, all of us marry on some level because we think we're upgrading our condition. But when a black male is not unemployed, he can't take care of his family, and so generally, if it's a long-term unemployment, the family breaks up. Not just because the woman is not getting what she needs economically, but the black men feel, not doesn't feel good about himself, so he doesn't feel he can stay, because he can't support his family. And your opinion on African-American women willing to work? Yes, we have a history of work in this country. We have the strongest employment patterns in this country of any ethnic group. But for what I'm calling the age condensed multi-generational welfare families, which are the mothers who have a history of adolescent child bearing, the daughter is 16, the grandmother is 30, you know, the great-grandmother is 45,

these are the age condensed families. And they have multi-generational welfare. And if these other families are going to have the hardest time getting off of welfare, but this welfare reform, the passage of the welfare reform bill. And these are the families that I'm most concerned about, and as a society, we are most concerned about. But no, there's no question that we have a legacy of work, and we historically have the strongest employment patterns of any ethnic group as women in this country. Have you put your finger on how certain families buy into the cycle of welfare recipients? As you just mentioned. Yeah, they buy in because it's all they know, because they have been, again, quarantined in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty. There are now no jobs, there are no men to take care of them, and they don't know anything else, and it has become a cycle. And to try to break it is going to take time. It's nothing that's going to be a quick fix and overnight fix,

and that's why I write my book, because it shows the historic pattern, and patterns that have taken this long to develop cannot be fixed overnight. There was always kind of an assumption that all mother-only families looked alike, or all black families who only had mothers looked alike, and I'm showing even among poor families, there are differences, and it depends on the amount of time they've been poor, how many generations have been on welfare. Again, whether or not they're one of these age-condensed families, that you have an absence of men. You've always had an absence of men in these families for several generations. You know, the women will have children, but they'll never marry the fathers. The fathers don't have any connection with the children, and I describe those families as separate from more stable working families who may even not have a father in the home, but they have a pattern and a work history, and that's what's different. So I describe them, and then I talk about what needs to be done, and I match the interventions with the particular types of families. What do we tell these young men?

They need intensive work, too. They need to be paired with role models, black men who have jobs, who work, who have a sense of responsibility for their families, who have a sense of themselves as men. They've got to be given jobs because you don't have high self-esteem if you can't work. Many of them have to be put in drug rehabilitation programs, look at their drug addicted. We've got to try to keep them out of the gangs, out of the criminal justice system. We've got to give them a sense of hope, and it sounds very simple, but it's more than a notion. And so it's a comprehensive program. No quick fixes again. I'm sitting here wondering what particularly happened. I'm quite sure there's been fatherless families up until the present time, but something seemed to explode during the early 70s or middle 70s and it's just proliferated to the point where definitely this book in which you have written

is a necessity for the survival of the African-American family. Yeah. While we saw, see in the 50s, the problems were getting bigger and bigger, but nobody talked about it. In the 60s, the now Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, which worked in the Kennedy and Johnson administration, discovered see all of these things were written about the black family, but nobody was talking about that. Then he released this controversial report about the black family. And he said at that time the 25% of the black families were headed by women. And he called black families matriarchal, and he said the black men needed to be taken away about how to be men. And it was so controversial that shortly after it, the report was released, the Watts riots broke out, and then the Newark riots and all of these urban riots and all of the problems in the 60s. So wife got so afraid of talking about the problems of the black family

because all of these things happened after the report was written in. And I think it happened because not just because of the report, because a lot of other things that were festering and nobody was talking about. But nobody even did research on the black family. Whites were scared to do anything and talk about anything in the black family that would be considered negative. And so nobody talked about it. And so when I went to the University of Chicago in 1982, I was working with the person who is now the poverty expert at Harvard, William Julius Wilson. And he said we've got to talk about these things. And that's what's burned out reports. So when the 70s, when the problems were escalating and the 60s and the 50s, nobody talks about them and nobody wrote about them. And that's why we're saying now we've got to talk about them. There's not going to be a riot and even if there is, maybe we've got to deal with that and go down to the source of what that problem is too. But there's been too much not said about these problems because of the fear that was created and the tempest and the, you know, the turbulence that was created when people started talking about them.

How does our educational system play in this particular crisis that we have ongoing? Because our young people who go to high schools in the inner city are not developing the competencies they need to be competitive in the workplace. So even if they have 12 years of education or one year of community college, they're not competitive with whites who go to suburban schools where there is a much greater expenditure per child on, you know, per capita. And they have the access to computers and to, they have high reading scores, high math scores, they get all the special attention they need. So the kids who go to school in urban ghettos, urban education has failed these children. So even if they stay in school, they don't come out with the competencies they need to be competitive in the workforce. With the individuals that you spoke with in the process of writing this book, do they feel that society is basically forgotten about them or just left them out?

They do, and that's what we have to understand because if they don't feel that the society has an interest in them or that they are disconnected, we call it social isolation is the academic term we use. If they feel socially isolated and not a part, that's why they can terrorize people and, you know, burglarize and do the gang stuff they do and killing innocent people because they feel like outsiders. And that's why we have to bring them in. If they feel that they have a part in America's wealth or America's whatever happens, then they're going to sabotage us. They're going to continue to do some of the things they are now doing, particularly in the gang activities. Are we beginning to talk? Hopefully we will, and that's why I wrote the book. So we can start the dialogues, we can start the discourse. Was it difficult in ascertaining the information which is included in the book?

You know, it's funny, it wasn't. I mean, it was hard work to put it together, but it wasn't difficult as I thought it would be. There was so much that had never been uncovered so much that was right there that no one had ever talked about. And so I just pulled it all together. I just did the work of going into the libraries and going into the communities and talking to people. But the information is on several levels. It's from the communities that I went in. That I went to Washington DC for a year at Howard University and went to the archives there and got a lot of information. And then it was pulling it together that was the challenge. And yes, it took time. But it'll be more than worth the time. If people will start talking about these issues and if we can start changing our approach to dealing and addressing with these problems. Was it difficult in finding a publisher? No, I had lots of people interested in publishing it. No, there's a lot of interest in publishing it. No, that wasn't the problem.

How long did it take you to compile all the information and decide what you're going to use? That was a hard process. And what you're not going to use? It took me about five to six years working on it directly and about two to three years I was thinking about it before I even started to work on it. Were any assistance involved in the formulation of the work to help you? Yeah, a lot of students and a lot of people that we paid to to come in. Yeah, but mainly my students. The underclass has been written and said about the underclass. Is there underclass in the African American community? We don't like to use the word underclass because it's just a pejorative. It connotes the idea that nothing can be done to change it, that they're on the bottom, and nothing can change. But there is a group that experiences persistent poverty, that experiences social isolation and neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, that have had multi-generational dependence on welfare,

that have been out of the workforce, that we call weak attachment to the workforce, and that has not bought into the American dream in the way that you and I have. And so they're separate from us in that sense. And we've got to bring them in. In certain segments of the book and some of the graphs which are illustrated in the book, one can come away with a conclusion that our government has conspired against the African American people. I don't think it's conscious conspiracy theory. I think it's more the term that Daniel Patrick Moynihan used in the 60s. It's benign neglect. And I saw yesterday that a group in the New York Times, that a group of congressmen, are willing now to apologize to African Americans for slavery. And I said, what a wonderful idea that they would apologize for.

America has never admitted its participation in the horrendous things that have happened to us. Donna L. Franklin offered the book, ensuring inequality, the structural transformation of the African American family, published by Oxford University Press. If you have a question of common or suggestions asked your future in black America programs, write us. Also let us know what radio station you heard us over. The views and opinions expressed on this program are not necessarily those of this station or of the University of Texas at Austin. Until we have the opportunity again for IBA technical producer Cliff Hargrove, I'm John L. Hansen, Jr. Thank you for joining us today and please join us again next week. Cassette copies of this program are available and may be purchased by writing in black America cassettes. Communication Building B, UT Austin, Austin, Texas, 78712. From the University of Texas at Austin, this is the Longhorn Radio Network.

John L. Hansen, Jr. joined me this week on in black America. Black middle class people, we still experience discrimination and we still can be stopped by the police. And we still have problems, but we have a sense of hope that if we work hard enough, there's still a way we're going to be included in the system. During inequality, the structural transformation of the African-American family with author Donna L. Franklin this week on in black America.