‘Black Marriage Day’ Highlights The Most Powerful Remedy For Strengthening Black Families
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.”
Although marriage isn’t a cure-all, new research from the Institute for Family Studies shows that in the vast majority of cases, black (and white) children raised in a home with their married parents are far more likely to “avoid poverty and prison, and to graduate from college.”
Black Marriage Day
Two decades ago, Nisa Muhammad, currently the assistant dean of religious life at Howard University, reached the same conclusion after attending a Smart Marriages conference. So she decided to do something about it.
In 2003, she created Black Marriage Day to celebrate black marriage and support black couples who want to get and stay married, and the event has occurred every year since. This year it’s scheduled for March 23, 2025. At last count, celebrations occurred in more than 300 communities nationwide, mostly in churches. The movement has even spawned weekend and weeklong celebrations, retreats, and expos.
The focus on black youth and amplification of thriving black marriages has become a crucial part of the message of Black Marriage Day. “For young people who live in communities where marriages are not the norm, it’s an opportunity for them to see the value of marriage and hear from people who love being married,” Muhammad says.
When she speaks to college and high school students, she reminds them of the “Kissing Song” and asks her audiences what sequence they envision for their lives. Nearly 100 percent of students desire the traditional route: love, marriage, and then the baby carriage. Unfortunately, that’s not the usual order among many black Americans, but young people often lack sufficient roadmaps.
Majidah, a 37-year-old Maryland mother of four, and her friends want the traditional marriage and family route too. She and her friends look up to their grandparents, many of whom had long-term marriages, and talk regularly about how to achieve the same longevity and legacy in their families. The key to achieving that stability is to grow “stable black communities,” she says.
This year Majidah is celebrating Black Marriage Day by leading a couples’ game night in collaboration with her local chapter of Fab Wives, a community support organization that helps wives navigate love and marriage. Last year, she and her husband of 12 years hosted a dinner in a restaurant’s private dining room for a dozen couples.
Arkansas residents Jamil and Teasha are celebrating a second, later-in-life marriage. But they’re still big fans of Black Marriage Day and routinely share what they’ve learned about marriage with young couples, particularly their own children and grandchildren.
The black family has been the object of society’s jokes long enough, Jamil says. But perceptions have become ingrained that black parents won’t be married and that women will have multiple fathers for their children.
Perverse Incentives
It wasn’t always this way. 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.”
Two events in her young life made a lifelong impression on Teasha. At a doctor’s appointment during her fourth pregnancy, the nurse asked how many men had fathered her children. The nurse’s jaw dropped when Teasha replied “one.”
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.
In short, marriage penalties continued, and a plenitude of federal safety net subsidies from food stamps to housing to health care were enacted. As Carroll points out, these programs came with marriage penalties that ensured single mothers were essentially “married to the state.”
Despite attempts at course correction like Black Marriage Day, elite critics have tried to thwart progress, terming it racist, patriarchal, and discriminatory. Muhammad says the entertainment industry once guided people toward marriage with positive messages in film and music. Not anymore.
“There’s always this counter like Oprah’s not married, and she’s doing wonderful. That is not the real world,” Muhammad reminds young people.
Celebrate Success
Thankfully, many individuals heroically defy statistical trends, especially in black churches. Psychologist and professor Kevin Washington, who is also past president of the Association of Black Psychologists, isn’t a pastor, but he does counsel black couples to transcend the unique burdens they face in our culture.
On Black Marriage Day weekend, he’s hosting an Atlanta retreat in conjunction with a local church. The event will include a vow renewal ceremony and recognition of the longest marriages.
But it’s also important to “celebrate the small successes” among black marriages, he says. So couples who have been together the least amount of time will also be acknowledged. As Washington says, “commitment leads to success in the marriage, but also to greater success in all areas of life.”
Jesus Christ is King
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