> Negro Illegitimacy Rate Hits 80%%
> A Dubious Milestone
> By BOB HERBERT
>
> Published: June 21, 2008
>
> Some years ago, I wrote about a teenager named Kendra Newkirk, who was
> raised by her mom and had only seen her dad once in her life. Because of
> an emergency, Kendra and her mom had to meet the father at a
> particularly busy public location in Brooklyn.
>
> Kendra had no idea what he looked like. "It was hard," she told me. "He
> could have been any one of those men walking on the street. I kept
> asking my mother: 'Is that him? Is that him?' "
>
> I've been thinking about Kendra ever since Barack Obama spoke on
> Father's Day about the tragic flight of so many American fathers,
> especially black fathers, from their children's lives.
>
> His comments came as the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern
> University in Boston was compiling data that revealed a dubious
> milestone. In 2006, for the first time in U.S. history, a majority of
> all births to women under 30 — 50.4 percent — were out of wedlock.
> Nearly 80 percent of births among black women were out of wedlock.
>
> By comparison, when John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960, just
> 6 percent of all births were to unmarried women under 30.
> Since then, the percentages have risen across the ethnic spectrum.
> One-third of white, non-Hispanic women under 30 who gave birth in 2006
> were unmarried. For Hispanics, it was 51 percent.
>
> more:
>  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/21/opinion/21herbert.html?ex=137178720...
>
> www.NatVan.com