There’s a problem with the idea that the legacy of slavery in America is the major deterrent today to social and economic progress by black Americans. And it’s being ignored as the New York Times and others seek to redefine America’s history as having been shaped more by slavery than any other factor.
A number of historians reject this idea while recognizing that slavery and segregation have played a powerful role in holding back advancement by blacks.
But Thomas Sowell, the famous black economist, makes a compelling case that it’s no longer the legacy of slavery that is most harmful to blacks. Rather, it’s the legacy of liberalism and the welfare state that are to blame.
“If we wanted to be serious about evidence, we might compare where blacks stood a hundred years after the end of slavery with where they stood after 30 years of the liberal welfare state,” Sowell wrote in 2014. “In other words, we could compare hard evidence on ‘the legacy of slavery’ with hard evidence on the legacy of liberals.”
“Despite the grand myth that black economic progress began or accelerated with the passage of the civil rights laws and the ‘war on poverty’ programs, the cold fact is that the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent by 1960,” he wrote. “This was before any of those programs began.”
Those years were marked by blacks acting without government assistance. Hundreds of thousands of Southern blacks migrated to the North, where they found jobs and better schools.
“Over the next 20 years, the poverty rate among blacks fell another 18 percentage points … This was a continuation of a previous economic trend, at a slower rate or progress, not the economic grand deliverance proclaimed by liberals and self-serving black ‘leaders.’”
Sowell has been a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution since 1980. He retired recently from writing a nationally syndicated column. He’s written more than two dozen books on a wide range of subjects, including race, economics, immigration, ethnic groups, and late-talking children.
He says liberals have difficulty coming to grips with the failure of their programs. “They simply cannot look at the evidence and say, ‘My God, we made things worse,’” he said on Hoover colleague Peter Robinson’s radio show, Uncommon Knowledge.
Sowell has questioned the effect of the legacy of slavery in the 21st century. “Whether it is the dearth of marriages and the family among contemporary blacks or their lower labor force participation than whites, or their higher crime rates, slavery has often been invoked as an explanation,” he wrote in his 2005 book, Black Rednecks and White Liberals.
“Yet the fact is that in the late nineteenth century, when blacks were just one generation out of slavery, there was nothing like today’s levels of unwed births or failure to participate in the labor force,” he wrote. “It has been from the 1960s onward that these social pathologies have escalated. Whatever the cause, it has arisen long after slavery had ended.”
The marriage and family data Sowell cites are striking. In 1960, 78% of black children were being raised in two-parent families. “But thirty years after the liberal welfare state found the great majority of black children being raised by a single parent (66 percent),” he wrote in 2014.
Both a “precipitous decline” in black marriage rates and a “sharp increases in premarital first births began in the 1960s,” Sowell wrote in the 2005 book. “From 1930 to 1934, 31 percent of first births to black women were premarital, while from 1990 to 1994, 77 percent were … That such a ‘legacy of slavery’ would take nearly a century to appear strains credulity.”
For now, Sowell is a voice in the wilderness on the lack of relevance of the legacy of slavery in 2019. There’s a difference between him and promoters of the legacy of slavery. It’s the difference between evidence and politics.
Fred Barnes, a Washington Examiner senior columnist, was a founder and executive editor of the Weekly Standard.
