No, Byron Donalds, Jim Crow Didn’t Create Stronger Black Families

At an event in Philadelphia promoting Donald Trump and the Republican Party on Tuesday, Representative Byron Donalds of Florida made the eyebrow-raising assertion that Black families were stronger, and Black people more conservative, under the Jim Crow regimes of the former Confederate states.

“You see, during Jim Crow, the Black family was together,” Donalds said. “During Jim Crow, more Black people were not just conservative — because Black people have always been conservative-minded — but more Black people voted conservatively.”

When met with pushback from Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, Donalds responded with a video posted on X, in which he said that “you had more Black families under Jim Crow” and that it was “Democrat policies … under the welfare state that did help to destroy the Black family.”

Donalds, who is as much a provocateur as he is a lawmaker, is almost word-for-word parroting the arguments of the prolific conservative commentator Thomas Sowell, who made this critique of the federal social safety net the cornerstone of his commentary on the status and prospects of Black Americans in the 1980s and ’90s. “The Black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of liberals’ expansion of the welfare state,” Sowell wrote.

Now, there have always been a few problems with this assessment, beginning with the underlying assumption that the relative economic success of white Americans is due primarily to stable family structure and not the result of broad and largely unrestricted access to education, economic opportunity and public goods as well as full political representation and the protection of the law.

But the single most important problem is that to the extent that we can speak of these things as singular entities, neither the Black family nor the Black community was all that strong or intact under either slavery or Jim Crow, nor were there — in Donalds’s formulation — more Black families.