Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) was out campaigning for Donald Trump in Philadelphia on Wednesday and shed light on the truth about the state of black families in America.
“You see, during Jim Crow, the black family was together. During Jim Crow, more black people were not just conservative — black people have always been conservative-minded — but more black people voted conservatively,” Donalds stated. “And then HEW [Department of Health, Education, and Welfare], Lyndon Johnson — you go down that road, and now we are where we are.”
So, where are we now? Black families have been devastated by successive waves of Democrat-created policies, an alphabet soup of government agencies that on the whole do more harm than good to the black family. Democrats get all bent out of shape if a Republican begins to make inroads into the black vote, clinging to a plantation mentality to keep black Americans in line.
Democrats were quick to attack.
“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,” Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said. “That’s an outlandish, outrageous, and out-of-pocket observation.”
But that’s not what Donalds said. He did not claim that “black folks were better off during Jim Crow.” He clearly stated that the “black family was together” and that more black people were conservative and voted conservatively during that time.
The Biden campaign, of course, took Jeffries’s misrepresentation and ran with it.
It’s crucial to note that Donalds was exclusively referring to “the black family.” He wasn’t saying that black people were better off under Jim Crow. He pointed out that the black family was better off before liberal government policies made it more profitable for husbands and wives to divorce and single women to have many children out of wedlock.
Donalds took to X to clarify his position amidst the lies and exaggerations.
“What I said was, is that you had more black families under Jim Crow, and it was the Democrat policies — under HEW, under the welfare state — that did help to destroy the black family,” Donalds said.
Today, the black divorce rate is more than 30%, compared to 18.5% for Hispanics, 15% for whites, and 12.4% for Asians. Out-of-wedlock births for blacks are at a staggering 72%. This is after trillions of dollars in transfer payments to black communities since the 1960s.
Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan foresaw this disaster in 1965 when he was working at the Department of Labor. His report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” remains one of the most thoughtful treatises on the black family.
Moynihan wasn’t calling for an end to government welfare spending but was urging an end to policies destroying the black family. He advocated for a massive increase in giving black men the skills they needed to work in America.
In a letter to President Lyndon Johnson, Moynihan argued that without access to jobs and the means to support a family, black men would become systematically alienated from their roles as husbands and fathers, leading to skyrocketing rates of divorce, child abandonment, and out-of-wedlock births in the black community.
Moynihan made a contemporaneous argument for programs for jobs, vocational training, and educational programs for the black community. Modern scholars believe that his report was one of the most influential in the construction of the War on Poverty.
But instead of heeding Moynihan’s recommendations, subsequent administrations ignored them, and the black community nitpicked the report to death, accusing Moynihan of “blaming the victim.” This criticism is incredibly shallow when considering the entire report.
Donalds was not wrong. His message is precisely what the black community needs to hear. But Democrats need to discredit voices like Donalds to maintain the plantation mentality they use to keep black Americans in line.
