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… is from page 279 of the 2016 second edition of Thomas Sowell’s excellent volume Wealth, Poverty and Politics [2] (footnote deleted; link added):
Empirical evidence has likewise seldom been mentioned by those who make a common claim, advanced by [Nicholas] Kristof among many others, that “Slavery and post-slavery oppression left a legacy of broken families” among blacks [3]. But the plain fact is that the proportion of black children living with only one parent was never as great during the first hundred years after slavery as it became in the first thirty-five years after the great expansion of the welfare state, beginning in the 1960s. Yet the “legacy of slavery” argument continues to be blithely repeated, and the legacy of the welfare state ignored.