The US Department of Labor on the Destructive Components of the Matriarchal Black Family Structure

"The Negro Family: The Case for National Action" by Assistant Secretary in the United States Department of Labor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan written in 1965 details how black families came to be matriarchal or led by women and how this leads to feelings of powerlessness and alienation within the black man. I selected some of the more interesting quotes from the document and included links to the chapters from which they are derived. This is a big part of how we ended up in the situation we are in today and it had its roots partially in slavery:


"E. Franklin Frazier makes clear that at the time of emancipation Negro women were already "accustomed to playing the dominant role in family and marriage relations" and that this role persisted in the decades of rural life that followed."



"The Negro statistics are symtomatic [sic] of some old socioeconomic problems, not the least of which are under employment among Negro men and compensating higher labor force propensity among Negro women. Both operate to enlarge the mother's role, undercutting the status of the male and making many Negro families essentially matriarchal. The Negro man's uncertain employment prospects, matriarchy, and the high cost of divorces combine to encourage desertion (the poor man's divorce), increases the number of couples not married, and thereby also increases the Negro illegitimacy rate."



"In a matriarchal structure, the women are transmitting the culture."



"The Negro wife in this situation can easily become disgusted with her financially dependent husband, and her rejection of him further alienates the male from family life. Embittered by their experiences with men, many Negro mothers often act to perpetuate the mother centered pattern by taking a greater interest in their daughters than their sons."



"The effect on family functioning and role performance of this historical experience [economic deprivation] is what you might predict. Both as a husband and as a father the Negro male is made to feel inadequate, not because he is unlovable or unaffectionate, lacks intelligence or even a gray flannel suit. But in a society that measures a man by the size of his pay check, he doesn't stand very tall in a comparison with his white counterpart. To this situation he may react with withdrawal, bitterness toward society, aggression both within the family and racial group, self-hatred, or crime."




"Historically, in the matriarchal Negro society, mothers made sure that if one of their children had a chance for higher education the daughter was the one to pursue it."




"When Jim Crow made its appearance towards the end of the 19th century, it may be speculated that it was the Negro male who was most humiliated thereby; the male was more likely to use public facilities, which rapidly became segregated once the process began, and just as important, segregation, and the submissiveness it exacts, is surely more destructive to the male than to the female personality. Keeping the Negro "in his place" can be translated as keeping the Negro male in his place: the female was not a threat to anyone."




"Since many slaveowners neither fostered Christian marriage among their slave couples nor hesitated to separate them on the auction block, the slave household often developed a fatherless matrifocal (mother-centered) pattern."


"In essence, the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is to out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well."


All passages were taken from the two chapters titled:

Chapter III The Roots of the Problem

http://www.dol.gov/oasam/programs/history/moynchapter3.htm

Chapter IV. The Tangle of Pathology

http://www.dol.gov/dol/aboutdol/history/moynchapter4.htm