Black men are starting to realize the Democratic Party has nothing to offer them, and Democrats are terrified.

That is the subtext to the recent controversy surrounding the comments made by Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) at a “Congress, Cognac, and Cigars” event hosted by former President Donald Trump’s campaign in Philadelphia on Tuesday. At the event, which was purposefully designed as outreach by the Trump campaign to black men, Donalds said: “One of the things that is actually happening in our culture, which you are now starting to see in our politics, is the reinvigoration of black families, with younger black men and black women. And that is also helping to breed the revival of a black middle class in America.”

“You see,” Donalds continued, “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. And then, HEW, Lyndon Johnson, and then, you go down that road, and now we are where we are.”

Disingenuous Democrats, such as House Minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and the New York Times, immediately attacked Donalds by completely twisting his words. “Byron Donalds suggests Jim Crow had benefits for Black families,” the New York Times headline read. And Jeffries falsely claimed that Donalds said, “Black folks were better off during Jim Crow.”

Both Jeffries and the New York Times are lying about Donalds. Donalds did not say there were benefits to Jim Crow or that black people were better off under Jim Crow. What he did say was that the black family was more together under Jim Crow. 

And this is just factually true.

As soon as black people were allowed to marry legally after the end of slavery, black families eagerly embraced the institution of marriage. On the third anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, the Rev. Henry McNeil Turner of the African Methodist Episcopal Church said: “This is a day of gratitude for the freedom of matrimony. Formerly there was not security for domestic happiness. Our ladies were insulted and degraded with or without their consent. Our wives were sold, and husbands bought, children were begotten and enslaved by their fathers.” 

“We therefore were polygamists by virtue of our condition,” Turner, who was also the first black chaplain in the Union Army, said. “But now we can marry and live together till we die and raise our children and teach them to fear God.”

From the end of slavery up through the 1950s, young black men and women were actually more likely to be married than young white men and women. But as President Lyndon Johnson expanded the welfare state, and particularly after the Supreme Court held in King v. Smith that states could not deny welfare benefits to cohabitating women, then the black family disintegrated. In 1960, 62% of young black women were married. By 1980, that number had cratered to just 22%, and it has never recovered. 

Jim Crow was brutal on black people and black families. Black families have always had higher rates of divorce, and the cruelty of Jim Crow is a big reason why. But the love of the black family proved stronger than the hate of Jim Crow.

It was only after the expansion of the welfare state through Medicaid, food stamps, Section 8 housing, and the many other programs of the Great Society that the black family fell apart.

See, the welfare state is an oddly jealous partner. It does not care if you sleep around or even move in with another person. But if you should dare to get married, and thereby add your husband’s income to your own, the welfare state will cut you off without a cent.

That is the force that broke the black family apart: the perverse incentives of a Democratic welfare state that believes black fathers can be replaced by a welfare check.

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But Byron Donalds knows differently. He grew up without a father. He knows the real value black fathers bring to the lives of their children. This is a conservative insight. It is an insight that is spreading, especially among black men.

And Democrats are terrified of it.