A fresh call to strengthen the black family

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Thursday, December 4th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Myrna Brown

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: Retooling a call to action.

The year was 1965. While serving as Assistant Secretary of Labor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan published a report on the breakdown of the black family.

Despite gains in civil rights, Moynihan was concerned blacks did not have social and economic equality. The report was intended to persuade his boss, President Lyndon B. Johnson, to take federal action to strengthen the black family.

BROWN: In the report, Moynihan identified the reasons for the racial disparities. Topping the list: the rising numbers of female-led single-parent households and out of wedlock births. With Jim Crow laws hardly in the review mirror, that message was controversial.

Here is an edited clip of Moynihan defending the report in 1965 on Meet the Press. Audio from American History TV.

AMERICAN HISTORY TV: You say that 44 percent of the children in Harlem are illegitimate. Now how do you know that? New York City Department of Health sir…and right under our prosperous noses that happened. That hasn’t existed for fifty years. It’s happened in the last fifteen years in America. We’ve been sitting around thinking things we’re getting better. And they haven’t been getting better for those children.

Critics accused Moynihan of victim-blaming and overlooking issues like systemic discrimination, and the legacy of slavery.

Sixty years later, the Moynihan report is still being challenged.

Delano Squires is in the hot seat, literally. He’s sitting under bright lights in a Washington D.C. television studio, getting chewed out on C-SPAN.

CSPAN CALL: And this is Newman calling from San Antonio. Good Morning Newman. Good Morning. First of all, I would like to say to the gentleman. You know, it hurts me to see you sit there. Because really to me…you insulting my mama this morning.

The caller from Texas doesn’t like Squires:

CALLER: You don’t realize how you disgracing black people this morning man.

…and probably didn’t care much for Daniel Patrick Moynihan either back in the day.

DELANO SQUIRES: He basically said that my advocacy on behalf of the traditional family is a slight or a swipe at his single mom. And he got offended because he thought I was insulting his mom. And I was doing no such thing.

Squires told WORLD’s Washington producer, Harrison Watters, he was making this point to the TV audience.

SQUIRES: Despite all types of the everyday indignities that black Americans had to suffer, not just in the south. In 1965, at the time of the Moynihan Report, the non-marital birth rate for black families was…call it a quarter.

That means 75 percent of black children were born to married parents. Fast forward to 2023. Life has generally gotten better for black Americans since 1965. But the number of children born in single-parent homes has doubled. Just as Moynihan predicted.

SQUIRES: And he said the roles of husband and wife were reversed. His theory was that if the rest of society has a more patriarchal family structure and the black family has a matriarchal family structure that black families would be at structural disadvantage.

At 43, New York native Delano Squires wasn’t even born when Moynihan released his report in 1965. His parents immigrated from the West Indies and married in Queens.

AUDIO: Uh…let me see. I think I have a picture of them…

After inviting us to his Maryland home, he swipes through old photos on his phone.

AUDIO: My parents have been married forty-four years….

That’s the family structure Moynihan insisted was missing. And in the mid-nineties it was the most important part of Squires’ upbringing.

SQUIRES: And what we saw is that our lives looked very different than those of our peers. And oftentimes it was because not only were our parents together, but our dads were active in our lives, active in church. Our parents were raising us according to their Christian values and in homes where marriage was the norm. That’s what we knew.

And he never forgot it. After college, Squires wrote about being raised in a two-parent household. As a Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, he wrote a special report outlining a new plan to revive marriage and rebuild the black family. Squires says the biggest difference between his and Moynihan’s report is the call to action.

SQUIRES: Everyone he was writing to at this time was white. It’s now 2025 and black Americans have far more political representation, economic power, and education. My audience is the black leadership class.

Squires calls it the “afrostocracy.” Black preachers, politicians, professors, pundits and performers, all on the center left.

SQUIRES: I put it this way. If you want to fix the home you have to get four houses in order, the church house, the school house, the state house and then the art house.

In September, Squires invited representatives from those “houses” to join forces with conservative leaders. The goal: create a culture of marriage and strong families.

AUDIO: [Audience applause…] Welcome….

This is a recording from that joint event. Squires says his pitch to potential participants: replace the notion of Black Lives Matter with black wives matter.

SQUIRES: Can you do that? NAACP, can you prioritize this issue for the next five years? Same for the Urban League.

Squires says he didn’t get any responses from those organizations. Others agreed to come and speak and then backed out. But he refuses to believe black leaders are hostile towards the black family.

SQUIRES: I think there’s a certain sense of apathy towards it, benign neglect. Part of the reason is because the issues that they see as of more importance are abortion, LGBT issues, climate change. But one person, Khalil Thompson, who was at the event. He was someone who was just open to listening. Open to dialog.

In 2024 Khalil Thompson helped raise more than a million dollars for the Kamala Harris campaign. Who would have imagined a year later, Thompson and Squires would be standing on common ground in an auditorium at the Heritage Foundation.

PANEL LEADER: Khalil builds bridges [applause]

After the panel discussion, Thompson told me he and Squires may still be opponents on some issues:

KHALIL THOMPSON: But what I love in my brother is that he wants to solve something so that my daughter’s life is better. His kid’s lives are better and that we’re leaving a better society for our community.

SOUND: [KIDS CHATTER]

Back at Squires’s house, he says God has been preparing him for this work.

SQUIRES: Because it’s going to be laborious and it’s going to take time. It took about three generations to get to this point. It will take us at least three to get us out.

AUDIO: Is Camille downstairs with ya’ll?

But his motivation is the legacy he and his wife are leaving their four children.

SQUIRES: As a Christian, a husband and a father. In that order and before anything else, children need their father because God designed it… the family in such a way that it takes exactly one man and one woman to make one child. And if it takes two to make. I can infer it takes two to raise.

AUDIO: Camille…she had to go do an outfit change….

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