The U.S. marriage rate is near its lowest point in history, but it’s even worse among black Americans.

The black marriage rate has collapsed by half, from a 1960 high of 61 percent to today’s low of 31 percent, the lowest for any demographic group in America.

Almost 70 percent of black children are born to unwed mothers. These fatherless black children are three to four times more likely to be poor than their counterparts raised by married black parents. The outlook is particularly bleak for young black men who are far more likely to become incarcerated and suspended from school. Over the last several decades, the problem has become generational: Fewer black men with good jobs leads to fewer marriageable men and, in turn, fewer black marriages.

But add a married biological father to the home and what happens? As Conn Carroll writes in his new book, Sex and the Citizen: How the Assault on Marriage is Destroying Democracy, “There is nothing wrong with black boys in America today that can’t be solved by more married black fathers.” //

In the aftermath of Reconstruction, for the first time in our nation’s history, blacks had the legal right to marry and stabilize their families. And they did in droves. From the late 1800s until about 1960, young black men and women were more likely to be married than young white couples.

But government programs came along that “effectively eviscerated the black family and made fatherhood absence the norm,” Jamil says. In turn, black mothers became dependent on a government check to sustain their “impoverished lifestyle.”. //

Earlier on, she’d been juggling two small children, a part-time job, and college classes. Even with her husband’s full-time job, the couple barely made ends meet. When she sought financial assistance, a college administrator told her help was only available if she ditched her husband. “My peers were on assistance and seemed to be making more money,” she says. So why be married?

Why indeed? But that was America’s prevailing cultural message to black mothers and fathers. These welfare “man in the house” exclusions supposedly ended with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in King v. Smith; however, the ruling only held that the state had too broadly defined father to include cohabitating men, whether or not they were the child’s father.