Controversy Stirs as Black Republican Claims Black Family Thrived During Jim Crow Era – Fact Check

The big political news last night was that Donald Trump has supposedly started sending “vetting materials” and questionnaires to a variety of potential vice presidential nominees. The names include Doug Burgum (R-N.D.), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Byron Donalds (R-FL), Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), J.D. Vance (R-OH), and Tim Scott (R-S.C.). Of course, the list is subject to change, so it probably doesn’t mean much. At this stage, we have no idea what to make of it. Most of the names on the list — but not all — are rather uninspired, and a few of them would be actively bad and harmful choices.

At the same time, what we can be pretty sure of is that right now — and for the last several months — the Democratic Party has been working on ways to attack every single one of these potential nominees.

None of the names on the shortlist are a surprise, so they’ve presumably been digging up opposition research and monitoring everything these politicians say, hoping they can catch a slip-up or take something out of context. That’s to be expected at this point.

Even with that expectation in mind, the attack that’s unfolding right now on one of these potential vice presidential candidates — congressman Byron Donalds of Florida — is worth talking about. It’s maybe the single most revealing smear campaign of the election cycle so far.

On Tuesday, Donalds was speaking at an event in Philadelphia, along with Texas congressman Wesley Hunt (R-TX). The point of the event, apparently, was for the Trump campaign to reach more black voters by speaking honestly about the challenges that black communities are facing right now.

Of course, the main challenge in black communities — as I’ve said many times — is the epidemic of fatherlessness. Black Americans have the highest rate of out-of-wedlock births as compared to every other racial group, by far. Roughly 77% of black children born in 2015 were out-of-wedlock. That’s the most recent year I found data for this. Hispanics had a much lower rate, at 56%, followed by whites at 30% and Asians at 27%. It is not a coincidence, by the way, that if you were to look at a list of average household incomes in the USA by race, it would be the exact inverse of the fatherless list. Asians have the highest household income, followed by white, then Hispanic, then black.

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As far as I can tell, these numbers have held steady for decades. They’ve been consistent long enough that many people have come to believe that they’re inevitable. But that’s not true. There was in fact a time in American history when whites and blacks had roughly the same chances of growing up in a single-family home. This was a period when most black women got married before they had kids. And this isn’t ancient history. I’m talking about the first half of the 20th century, and in particular the 1950s and 60s.

At the event in Philadelphia, Byron Donalds addressed all of this directly. He began by talking about his own personal experiences with fatherhood. Then he pointed out that two-parent black households weren’t always an anomaly. Watch:

.@JoeBiden @RepJeffries @harrisonjaime & @DerrickNAACP are gaslighting Black America.

I was talking about Black families, conservative mindsets, and conservative voting.

Receipts are a beautiful thing! And don’t clip my words to keep lying. I’m watching 👀👀 pic.twitter.com/W2Fr5uAHE8

— Byron Donalds (@ByronDonalds) June 5, 2024

Everything Byron Donalds just said there is true. It’s not even remotely debatable, in fact. From 1890 to 1950, black women had an even higher marriage rate than white women. And in the 1950s the rates were about equal. As the Hoover Institution states:

In 1950, the percentages of white and African American women (aged fifteen and over) who were currently married were roughly the same, 67 percent and 64 percent, respectively. [But] by 1998, the percentage of currently married white women had dropped by 13 percent to 58 percent. But the drop among African American women was 44 percent to 36 percent—more than three times larger.

Additionally, between 1950 and 1997, the proportion of black births to teenage unwed mothers rose by 166%.

Any political party that wanted to reduce black crime rates and ensure that more black children go to school and get good jobs would be talking about these figures nonstop. They’re clearly the key to understanding what’s wrong in black communities, and how to fix them. But Democrats very desperately don’t want to have this conversation, because as Byron Donalds said, it implicates them — starting with Lyndon Johnson and the “Great Society” welfare programs that arose from the Civil Rights era.

As the Harvard professor Paul Peterson put it:

…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.

Peterson crunched the numbers and found that:

…in 1975, a household head would have to earn $20,000 a year to have more resources than what could be obtained from Great Society programs.

Adjusted for inflation, that means households would need to bring in $100,000 to match what the government would give them for free.

In other words, the government was providing a massive economic incentive for poor mothers to raise children alone, in single-parent homes. And because black mothers are an extremely poor demographic group, the incentive affected black families the most.

That’s not to say this is the only explanation that explains the decline in black family units. You can also look at the decline of industry, the offshoring of manufacturing jobs, the rise of feminism, the influence of the entertainment industry, and so on. But no reasonable person can doubt that a $100,000 government incentive to break up family homes was indeed a major factor that contributed to broken homes. And a serious political party — one that cared about black communities — would learn from that disaster and immediately reform these kinds of welfare programs.

But the Democratic Party has no interest in acknowledging any responsibility for their role in creating the crisis in the black community. After all, a core plank of Democratic Party mythology is that the civil rights movement was an unbridled good, and that no mistakes whatsoever were made in the process of creating the welfare programs that have persisted for generations. Instead, the Democrats’ top representative in the House, Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), just decided to simply lie about everything Byron Donalds said. Watch:

Jeffries: It has come to my attention that a so-called leader has made the factually inaccurate statement that black folks were better off during Jim Crow. How dare you make such an an ignorant observation. You better check yourself before you wreck yourself pic.twitter.com/TfxOwHGCl8

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 5, 2024

It’s kind of incredible how bad this guy’s Obama impression is. Or maybe it’s supposed to be MLK. He kind of has the cadence down, I guess. But then he starts repeatedly attacking a statement that no one made. Byron Donalds did not say that black Americans were “better off” during Jim Crow. He said black families were together in Jim Crow, and they’re not together now. Those are two distinct statements. But apparently Jeffries can’t grasp the distinction.

So he just makes a complete fool of himself, attacking a strawman over and over again, until he ends by somehow embarrassing himself even further. “You better check yourself before you wreck yourself”? Really? Are we quoting Ice Cube songs now on the House floor? This is what passes for rhetorical genius in the Democratic Party, post-Obama. This is the guy they’ll make the Speaker of the House if they ever get the majority back. He doesn’t speak very well, frankly.

But Hakeem Jeffries wasn’t alone. The brain trust at the Congressional Black Caucus put out a statement demanding that Byron Donalds apologize for telling the truth. They wrote,

This is a pattern of embracing racist ideologies that we see time and again within the MAGA Republican Party. … Rep. Donalds is playing his role as the mouthpiece who will say the quiet parts out loud that many will not say themselves. His comments were shameful and beneath the dignity of a member of the House of Representatives. He should immediately offer an apology to Black Americans for misrepresenting one of the darkest chapters in our history for his own political gain.

Well, they got one part right. Byron Donalds did indeed “say the quiet parts out loud.” He said the one thing that Democrats simply cannot allow anyone to say, which is that the policies of the Democratic Party drastically increased black dependency on the government and, in the process, destabilized the family structure.

That is the third rail that Democrats don’t want any politician to go anywhere near, even though with every passing year, it’s getting harder and harder to deny. The Democratic Party has controlled pretty much every major urban center in this country for decades, and after all that, they’ve only made things worse.

Remember Selma? The site of the famous civil rights marches? The city that’s been run by Democrats in perpetuity? They just went to virtual classes a few weeks ago — not because of COVID, but because too many children are getting shot. Watch:

Hakeem Jeffries and the Democratic Party never talk about Selma, even though Democrats have been running it for decades. The city that became famous during the Civil Rights movement remains, to this day, one of the poorest places in the entire country. It’s so dangerous now that they’re keeping children home from school.

That doesn’t necessarily mean the people of Selma were better off under Jim Crow, however Jeffries wants to define “better off.” But it does mean that the government certainly hasn’t helped matters in the wake of the civil rights movement. If there’s ever going to be a return to normalcy in Selma and dozens of other cities like it, then it’s necessary to first acknowledge that LBJ’s “Great Society” and its offshoots haven’t actually created great societies. They’ve done the opposite. Byron Donalds made that case this week. And by completely melting down in response, Democrats in the House have admitted that he was right.

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