Did the single motherhood rate among black Americans jump from 20% to 70% since the 1960s?

Question

In conservative responses to racial disparities involving wealth and other things a lack of fatherhood figures within the black community is often cited as causative. For example, Ben Shapiro said about 4 years ago:

[If racial disparities are not largely a "black" cultural problem, then explain why] the single motherhood rate in the black community jumped from 20% to 70% in the same course of time that the civil rights movement has made such tremendous strides.

I was reading around on similar topics on Skeptics and found a quote from MLK that criticized the black community in 1957 for their "illegitimacy rate".

We have eight times more illegitimacy than white persons.

I readily see that these two claims are not exactly comparable nor mutually exclusive. Both could be true at the same time, but it made me immediately think that perhaps there's a significant twist on both of these quotes that is not captured in their exact words.

I'm looking for a brief historical analysis on the "illegitimacy rates" in the black community¹. Shapiro is claiming an increase from a low rate (by today's standards) in the early sixties up to a high rate today, while MLK states pre-sixties that it was already high compared to whites. I'm supposing that perhaps Shapiro's claim misses a large bit of nuance in the relative differences, since his claim is absolute in context, or MLK's factoid is actually false (but was maybe a common misconception at the time).

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1. I understand "illegitimacy" to mean children born without married parents. It would be great if "committed relationship" were more quantifiable, in 1960 and now, because my impression of modern culture is that it is far more acceptable and common for committed couples to have children even if they are not legally married, but this seems unlikely to be differentiated in official statistics.

Answer 1

I'm looking for a brief historical analysis on the "illegitimacy rates" in the black community

• Tldr; The rate for non-whites was ~21% in 1960 and 72% for blacks in 1998. The figures and references are below.

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Did the single motherhood rate jump to 70% since the 1960s?

It has risen beyond 70% according to the CDC. This data was published by the CDC in 2000, in a report titled Nonmarital Childbearing in the United States, 1940–99. On page 7 is the Figure 10:

Was the single motherhood rate among blacks 20% in the 1960s?

This is tough to confirm, partly because at that time this data was grouped into "non-white" collectively with other minorities. That being said, the CDC listed the illegitimate rate of birth among this group at around 21% for 1960 (and less before that):

In a report titled The Negro Family: The Case For National Action by D.P. Moynihan (also called the Moynihan report) was written in 1965, and lists the single motherhood rate among blacks at 25%, and it appears to use the same data from the CDC as well as data from the most recent Censuses, and data from the BLS, which would include other non-white groups. That being said, after 1969 Blacks and Hispanics were recorded separately and the data is more clear.

The Moynihan report makes the same argument as Shapiro and other conservatives make today, so the position itself is nothing new.

BUT UNWED MOTHERS AREN'T NECESSARILY SINGLE!

Single motherhood is defined in this answer as a mother who birthed a child while not married. The author of the question specifically asked for "illegitimacy rates", which historically has meant illegitimate birth rates, meaning a child born to parents who were not legally married at the time. See the original question, and the first line of this answer.

That being said, this does not account for cohabiting parents, but it also does not account for homes where the couple is married and the father is away on active duty. Statistics is an imperfect science.

Also, many comments are concerned with cohabitation and claim that the true number of single mothers is (much?) lower than what the CDC is recording as such.

While that is true to some extent, it does need context:

• Those comments appear to define single motherhood as a child living with only one parent, the mother. This is not what the OP is asking for.

• While another answer on this post diligently points out that cohabitation among unwed parents is on the rise, the research that article is based on asserts that the rate of cohabitation in general as likely being less than 1% pre-1970. Data for cohabiting parents started being recorded in the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey in the 1990s.

Conclusion

• Changing the definition of single mother from what the OP has stated, and the implications thereof, would be a new claim and should be asked in a separate question. There is more research done on family structure that would detract from the core claim being examined in this question, which is whether or not what Shapiro and King said was related, accurate, and/or taken out of context.

• This answer asserts that if they are both referring to the same statistic - births to unwed mothers - then their claims are related, accurate, and not taken out of context, even if the specific language used was different.

• Both King and Shapiro's claims formed the premise/foundation for a broader argument. The validity of that argument is itself a separate claim and should be posted as another question.

Disclaimer: I am not interested in having the debate here (I see a lot of causation vs. correlation comments), only providing the data for others to study. But, I will debate in the chat if necessary.

Answer 2

I'm just providing the numbers. No claim about the cause can be made.

Shapiro is claiming an increase from a low rate (by today's standards) in the early sixties up to a high rate today, while MLK states pre-sixties that it was already high compared to whites.

I'd say both are correct.

The trends for one vs two parent families has been basically the same for Americans since 1960, the earliest I could find complete data for all groups. It started low, climbed until about 2000, and is now slowly going down again.

The magnitude is quite different by race. In 1960 there was already a large disparity in magnitude and has continued to be.

• 1960
  • Black - 22%
  • White - 8%
  • All - 10%
• 2020
  • Black - 51%
  • White - 27%
  • All - 36%

References

• Spreadsheet used to make the chart
• US Census Historical Living Arrangements of Children. Tables CH-1, CH-2, and CH-3 were used.
  • Where multiple data points existed for a year, PELNMOM and PELNDAD estimates and "Any child whose reported race included Black/White" were used.
  • I did not include "No Parents / Other Relatives".

Answer 3

Just to complement @Schwern's excellent answer, and similarly not attempting make any claims about cause, I note that Shapiro is talking about single parents (which @Schwern's answer addresses), whereas King is talking about "illegitimacy", that is, births to parents who are unmarried (although may still live in a 2 parent household).

The following graph, produced by The Social Capital Project (an ongoing research effort by The Congress Joint Economic Committee), shows the percentage of births that were to unmarried people, broken down by race, from 1952 to 2007, for women between 15-44, in the US.

The report details its sources in the Source Notes, with the main source being this CDC report.

Answer 4

Something notably absent from other answers (so far) has been data on the ratio of cohabiting parents. This Pew Research article using 2017 data (not long after Shapiro's comments) shows a total single-parent rate for Black families of 51%, with 43% having two parents (36% married and 7% cohabiting).

The highest accurate representation of children living with single mothers (including cohabitation) would be 54%. Even if you were to sum all children without married parents (including children living with no parents at all), the resulting 64% would still fall a bit short of his claim.

At best, Shapiro was exaggerating to make a point. The previous statement cannot be asserted, since we don't know what data Shapiro was referencing; differences in datasets could have resulted in something closer to his claim. When considering the actual data for all children under 18 around the time of his claim, it was not true.

An interesting note is that the solo-father and cohabitation rates are much closer across racial boundaries than the married and solo-mother rates.