that the most important civil rights battles were fought and won four decades before the Obama presidency. The black underclass continues to face many challenges, but they have to do with values and habits, not oppression from a manifestly unjust society. Blacks have become their own worst enemy, and liberal leaders do not help matters by blaming self-inflicted wounds on whites or “society.” The notion that racism is holding back blacks as a group, or that better black outcomes cannot be expected until racism has been vanquished, is a dodge. And encouraging blacks to look to politicians to solve their problems does them a disservice. As the next chapter explains, one lesson of the Obama presidency—maybe the most important one for blacks—is that having a black man in the Oval Office is less important than having one in the home.
The last time I saw my father he was pulling away from the curb in front of my home in suburban New York City, where he’d spent the weekend visiting his two toddler grandchildren and taking in a Yankees game with his only son. I asked him to call me when he got back to Buffalo, the city where I was raised, and where he still lived with my older sister and her two daughters. I don’t remember if he ever did, but a few days later my sister would phone to tell me that she had found him slumped over in his recliner when she arrived home from work one evening. Fourteen years after Mom had died, Dad was gone, too.
I have no recollection of my father ever living with my mother, or even much liking her. They married in 1964, had three children by 1972 (I was born in 1971), and would be divorced by the time Jimmy Carter took office. After the split they went out of their way to avoid speaking to one another, often using us children to communicate. Tell your mother this, or tell you father that, were common requests growing up as we shuttled back and forth between residences. But while their dislike of one another was palpable to us kids, it never seemed to interfere with our relationships with them. In fact, one of the few things they seemed to agree on was that the other was a good parent.
My sisters and I lived with our mother, but we had almost unlimited access to Dad, who took full advantage of his visiting privileges. The anthropologist Margaret Mead said that the ultimate test of any culture is whether it can successfully socialize men to willingly nurture their children. “Every known human society rests firmly on the learned nurturing behavior of men,” she wrote. “Each new generation of young males learn the appropriate nurturing behavior and superimpose upon their biologically given maleness this learned parental role.”1 I don’t know if my parents ever read Mead, but they certainly shared that sentiment.
Until the day he died my father was a constant presence in the lives of his children. Growing up, my sisters and I saw him Tuesdays, Thursdays, weekends, and holidays. My relationship with him was an especially close one that both he and my mother were keen to maintain. He checked my homework, helped me with my paper route, and spent hours at my side constructing and reconstructing my elaborate model train sets. My father and I were sports nuts. He taught me to hit, pitch, shoot, and tackle. He coached my Little League baseball teams. He had me on ice skates as soon as I could walk. We attended countless local college basketball games together, were Buffalo Bills season ticket holders, and regularly drove to Toronto to see the Yankees play the Blue Jays. None of this is especially remarkable fatherly behavior, of course, unless the father happens to be black. Fathers who live apart from their offspring are less likely to spend time with them, or contribute financially to their upbringing. My father distinguished himself by being there for us. And his behavior would become even more exceptional, statistically speaking, over time.
In 1965, when he was assistant secretary of labor for President Lyndon Johnson, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was already warning that the black family was in a state of crisis. Although nine in ten children in America lived with their biological father in 1960, some one in four black kids did not. By 2011 33 percent of children in the United States would be living with their mothers, but not their fathers. Among blacks the number would climb to 64 percent, or nearly two in three.
“Though income is the primary predictor, the lack of live-in fathers also is overwhelmingly a black problem, regardless of poverty status,” reported the Washington Times in 2012, citing census data. “Among blacks, nearly 5 million children, or 54 percent, live with only their mother.” Just 12 percent of poor black households have two parents present, compared with 41 percent of poor Hispanic families and 32 percent of impoverished white families. “In all but 11 states, most black children do not live with both parents. In every state, 7 in 10 white children do.”2
Divorce helped to drive these numbers in the 1960s and 1970s, but by the 1980s unwed parenthood was largely to blame. Today, more than 70 percent of black children are born to unwed mothers. Only 16 percent of black households are married couples with children, the lowest of any racial group in the United States, while nearly 20 percent are female-headed with children, which is the highest of any group. Like most blacks, my parents knew (if only from the experience of friends and family) all about the strong links between broken homes and bad outcomes. They knew that the likelihood of drug abuse, criminal behavior, teen pregnancy, and dropping out of school increased dramatically when fathers weren’t around. And though they couldn’t save their marriage, my parents were resolved to save their kids. What this meant in practice was that they tried, with mixed results, to minimize the impact of America’s black subculture on their children.
For her part, my mother turned to the church. She was born in Alabama in 1938 and raised Baptist, but became a Jehovah’s Witness at the urging of an older sister in the mid-1970s. My mother, my sisters, and I attended services three times a week, and the congregation was integrated but mostly black. That included most of the church elders—married men who held down jobs, provided for their families, didn’t smoke or curse, spoke standard English, dressed in suits and ties, and took fatherhood seriously. My mother wanted them to serve as role models for me, and they did, even long after I left the religion voluntarily in my teens. In addition, most of my extended family in Buffalo were members of the church. The aunt who introduced my mother to the religion had adult children who were also Witnesses. Two of her sons were church elders with kids my age; a daughter was married to an elder and they, too, had children being raised in the faith. It was a large, extremely close clan, and the adults were counting on the religion to provide not only spiritual guidance for the children but also something of a refuge from a larger black culture that seemed to be rapidly coarsening.
My father, who was never involved with the religion, thought it most important that his children be educated. He was born in Florida in 1941, but in the 1950s his family moved to Newburgh, New York, where he attended high school. He was an outstanding athlete, went to college on a football scholarship, and played professional football in Canada in the 1960s. When his playing days were through he returned to school and obtained a master’s degree in social work. I played my share of sports as a kid and he was always there to cheer me on, but Dad was adamant that schoolwork come first.
A year after I was born my parents left a predominantly black neighborhood and purchased a home by the University at Buffalo, my father’s alma mater. University Heights, as the neighborhood was known, was still predominantly white in the 1970s and 1980s—our nonwhite neighbors were mainly foreigners who attended the college or taught there—but black families like ours were starting to move in. Years later I asked my father why he and my mother had quit the black side of town. He told me that they didn’t like what blacks were doing to their own communities. He mentioned the crime, the abandoned lots, the graffiti, the litter, the unkempt homes. But his main concern, he said, were the “knuckleheads” and “thugs” whom he wanted his children far away from. He understood that some families didn’t have the means to leave, and he didn’t begrudge those who could move, but stayed anyway. But he wasn’t taking any chances with his kids.
My father spent most of his professional life working at a local psychiatric hospital run by the state. But he always had other jobs on the side, and they typically kept him in close contact with Buffalo’s black community. He ran a home for troubled boys when he got out of graduate school. Later he ran an after-school tutoring program for low-income