There is a statistic in Episode 2 of Resilience and Renewal that Bob Woodson has been citing for decades — and it has never stopped being stunning.

Between 1930 and 1940, racism was enshrined in American law. The Great Depression left 25% of white Americans and 40% of Black Americans unemployed. Jim Crow was not a theory; it was a daily reality.

And yet: during that same decade, the Black community had the highest marriage rate of any group in America.

Sit with that.

The narrative most widely promoted today — that the pathology visible in many low-income Black communities is a legacy of slavery and Jim Crow — cannot survive this fact. When the external forces of racism and poverty were at their most brutal, Black family structure was at its most resilient.

What changed?

In Episode 2, Bob Woodson traces the answer with the precision of someone who was there. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a Columbia University couple named Cloward and Piven published a strategy: flood the welfare system with applicants, bankrupt it, and force the government to redistribute income. The federal government, in the early 1970s, began actively recruiting Black Americans to the welfare rolls. To do it, they had to overcome the stigma — because in the Black community, Bob explains, being on relief was genuinely shameful. The ACLU filed suit to prevent welfare agencies from asking about fathers. The Black Power movement declared the nuclear family “Eurocentric.”

Within three years, millions of Black Americans flooded into welfare systems in New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia — at a moment when the unemployment rate for Black men in New York was under four percent.

“They separated work from income,” Bob says. “And it made the man redundant.”

The results followed exactly as predicted: school dropout rates increased, drug addiction rose, outer-wedlock births soared. The institutions that had sheltered the Black community from loneliness, violence, and despair — the two-parent family, the church, the civic organization, the local business — were systematically dismantled. Not by racism. By policy.

Bob has spent fifty years documenting this. The Woodson Center exists, in part, to ensure that this documentation reaches the people whose lives depend on understanding it.

Watch Episode 2 of Resilience and Renewal. Share it widely. This is the history that doesn’t get taught.