In every index of family pathology—divorce, separation, and desertion, female family head, children in broken homes, and illegitimacy—the contrast between the urban and rural environment for Negro families is unmistakable.
Harlem, into which Negroes began to move early in this century, is the center and symbol of the urban life of the Negro American. Conditions in Harlem are not worse, they are probably better than in most Negro ghettos. The social disorganization of central Harlem, comprising ten health areas, was thoroughly documented by the HARYOU report, save for the illegitimacy rates. These have now been made available to the Labor Department by the New York City Department of Health. There could hardly be a more dramatic demonstration of the crumbling—the breaking—of the family structure on the urban frontier.
| Health area[table 1] | Nonwhite | ||
| Total | 434.1 | ||
| No. 8 | 367.6 | ||
| No. 10 | 488.9 | ||
| No. 12 | 410.1 | ||
| No. 13 | 422.5 | ||
| No. 15 | 455.1 | ||
| No. 16 | 449.4 | ||
| No. 19 | 465.2 | ||
| No. 24 | 424.8 | ||
| No. 85.10 | 412.3 | ||
| No. 85.20 | 430.8 | ||
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Unemployment and Poverty
The impact of unemployment on the Negro family, and particularly on the Negro male, is the least understood of all the developments that have contributed to the present crisis. There is little analysis because there has been almost no inquiry. Unemployment, for whites and nonwhites alike, has on the whole been created as an economic phenomenon, with almost no attention paid for at least a quarter-century to social and personal consequences.
In 1940, Edward Wight Bakke described the effects of unemployment on family structure in terms of six stages of adjustment.21 Although the families studied were white, the pattern would clearly seem to be a general one, and apply to Negro families as well.
The first two stages end with the exhaustion of credit and the entry of the wife into the labor force. The father is no longer the provider and the elder children become resentful.
The third stage is the critical one of commencing a new day-to-day existence. At this point two women are in charge:
Consider the fact that relief investigators or case workers are normally women and deal with the housewife. Already suffering a loss in prestige and authority in the family because of his failure to be the chief bread winner, the male head of the family feels deeply this obvious transfer of planning for the family's well-being to two women, one of them an outsider. His role is reduced to that of errand boy to and from the relief office.22
If the family makes it through this stage Bakke finds that it is likely to survive, and the rest of the process is one of adjustment. The critical element of adjustment was not welfare payments, but work.
Having observed our families under conditions of unemployment with no public help, or with that help coming from direct [sic] and from work relief, we are convinced that after the exhaustion of self-produced resources, work relief is the only type of assistance which can restore the strained bonds of family relationship
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