142: Barbara
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People really were different back in the 60s. Here is something that it is impossible to imagine any politician saying today. Any successful mainstream big-time politician anyway. Listen to the President of the United States, June 4th, 1965. Perhaps most important is the breakdown of the Negro family structure. For this, most of all, white America must accept responsibility. It flows from centuries of oppression and persecution of the Negro man. In 1965, black single mothers became a national political issue, a national symbol for the very first time, and it was the Democrats who put the issue on the table. A young assistant secretary of labor named Daniel Patrick Moynihan submitted a report to President Lyndon Johnson calling for national action to do something about the large number of black single mothers. When large numbers of men grew up in homes without strong male authority, the report said it leads to chaos, crime, violence, and unrest. Black single mothers, the report declared, were at the center of, quote, "a tangle of pathology" in the black community. Black leaders, including the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., did not take too kindly to all this. They said that all this talk of black pathology had unfortunate racist overtones and the issue dropped from the national scene for years. Then the Republicans picked it up. Ronald Reagan talked about welfare queens. Dan Quail said the L.A. riots happened mainly because of a breakdown in traditional family structure. For two decades, the entire national debate over welfare reform has often seemed like it's really just a referendum on inner city single mothers, which brings us to Barbara Klinkscales. We gave Barbara Klinkscales a cassette recorder and for seven months, she taped her family's life. And the story we bring you today, her life in her own words, it isn't that it completely contradicts everything in the national debate over single mothers. Though sometimes it does contradict that debate. It's more that when you hear her talk, the national policy discussion somehow seems irrelevant and off the point. It's as if the policymakers have no real picture of what a life like hers is really like. Today we devote our entire program to her story. From W.B.E.E.S.E. Chicago and Public Radio International, it's his American life, I'm out of glass. Like most African-American single mothers, like 77% of them, Barbara Klinkscales works for a living. She has a job in the new information economy as a data entry operator. And she's so committed to seeing that her kids graduate high school that when her son Gerald cut some classes, she started escorting him to class herself, telling his classmates, "My name is Barbara. I think we'll be seeing a lot of each other from now on." Before we start our story, some quick statistics to put all this in perspective, Barbara's family is not unusual at all. There has been a radical shift in American family structure. The number of children born to black single mothers has risen from 17% in 1950 to 70% to 70% in 1994. The number of white children born to single mothers has risen even faster from 1.7% in 1950 to 25% in 1994. Here then is the story of one single mother, children around words. Hi, I know we laid, I'm sorry. Yes, my fault this time. Let me introduce myself. My name is Park. Hi baby, good morning. My single mom, I have three kids, Angie, Tess and Gerald. Good morning. Angie's 25, Tess and Gerald are 17. They are twins. They're in high school in the 11th grade. Hi, my name is Barbara Kleece because everybody know me. I know, I know that name from somewhere Kleece. Yeah, I always bring him to school. When I stand here, why he go up to his lock and he come back. Every morning, I take Gerald to school. If I don't take him to school, he'll get up, get dressed and he'll just sit there. He won't go. In order to take him to school, I have to go a half hour out my way in the opposite direction of my workplace. And after I leave his school, it takes me another 50 minutes to an hour back past my house before I get to work. All together, it takes me an hour and a half to two hours
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