Black Community News News and Commentary for Christians
Family Research Council is deeply concerned about the status of Black America. That’s why two of our top researchers issued an important study on the present condition of black families. Titled “The State of the Black Family in America,” this February 2015 report was compiled by FRC Senior Fellow, Dr. Patrick Fagan, and lead researcher, Christina Hadford.
This report honors the legacy of Dr. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Pat Moynihan first raised serious concerns about the Black family in 1965. Moynihan, a liberal academic and later U.S. Senator, cried out for help to address the critical issue of family breakdown among minorities and especially among Black Americans. Fagan and Hadford note that the deterioration of family life among Black Americans has accelerated alarmingly.
Star Parker is a civil rights activist, whose Board of Advisers I chair, is leading a new generation pro-life activism within the Black community. She, and they, envision a future that is not dominated by liberal elites who are uniformly pro-abortion.
Journalist Paige Winfield Cunningham, writing in The Washington Examiner, details the story of increasing civil rights activism among pro-lifers. In “Black Babies Matter,” in the Examiner’s September 28, 2015 edition, Cunningham writes of Ms. Parker’s CURE initiative.
Many of this new generation of pro-life activists recently took part in a significant event at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. This site is vital to the history of all Americans as the location of Dr. Martin Luther King’s great march for voting rights in 1965.
Star, Dr. Alveda King and others want to remind all Americans that Dr. M.L. King’s work is not done. Ms. Parker told the mixed race crowd that had gathered in Selma that: “If black lives matter, then black children matter, then black babies matter.”
Figures from the federal Centers for Disease Control show that black women are subject to abortion nearly three times as often as white women and nearly twice as often as Hispanic women. The rate is 30 per 1,000 black women.
Jason Riley, a young black columnist with the Wall Street Journal courageously took up this theme when he wrote:
The political left obsesses over racial disparities in bank loans or college admissions or police shootings, but “largely missing from the debate,” wrote Zoe Dutton in the Atlantic magazine last year, “is discussion of abortion’s racial disparity.”
In New York City, home to the largest black population of any U.S. urban area, more black babies are aborted than born. New York’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene reported in 2014 that black babies constitute 42% of all abortions in a city where blacks are 25% of the population. In Georgia, where whites outnumber blacks 2 to 1, more than 53% of abortions involve black babies, and black women terminate their pregnancies at nearly 2.5 times the rate that white women do.
How can this be? Black Americans are the most churched of all Americans. The Black church has provided the leadership of the civil rights movement. Dr. King was emphatic on this point. He wanted Americans to know that his Southern Christian Leadership Conference was fully in line with the best of America’s godly heritage.
To highlight this appalling situation, Family Research Council’s Senior Fellow, Bishop E.W. Jackson recently led a group of pastors and civil rights supporters to the steps of the National Portrait Gallery.
I joined Bishop Jackson there to protest NPG honoring Margaret Sanger. She was the founder of Planned Parenthood.
Bishop Jackson pointed to Sanger’s “Negro Ministers’ Project” of the 1930s and her willingness to carry her birth control message to a New Jersey Klavern of the Ku Klux Klan. Sanger sought to recruit Black pastors because she did not want the word to get out in our churches that she wanted to eliminate America’s Black population.
Sanger constantly denied any such intent, but she argued incessantly for creating “a race of thoroughbreds.” Not since the days of Slavery had such language been used, comparing human lives to horse breeding.
Planned Parenthood has spent millions of tax dollars in PR campaigns designed to paint their abortion trafficking in colors of pale pink pastel.
Pro-life investigators from Live Action recorded Planned Parenthood operatives only too willing to accept donations for abortions for Black women.
Another group, the Life Issues Institute (LII), used 2010 Census data to show that Planned Parenthood locates its abortion killing centers in communities where the minority population is greater than 50%. LII found that 79% of these centers—those that actually kill the unborn—are within a two-mile radius of such Census tracts.
In Congress, Sen. Tim Scott (R) of South Carolina and Rep. Mia Love (R) of Utah raised their voices for the unborn. They are receiving more attention as the nation engages in this latest media discussion of violence and race. These young leaders in the Senate and House are calling Americans to a greater awareness of the devastating impact of abortion in the Black community.
Liberal abortion—this modern day slaughter of innocents—is what President Reagan called it in his 1986 State of the Union Address: “a wound in the nation’s conscience.”
Ken Blackwell is a senior fellow at the Family Research Council and the American Civil Rights Union, and on the board of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.
