There was a really critical article up in the New Republic about the substantial disillusion of the black family over the past century. Here's the portion with the most significant data:

However, as classic work by Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman has shown, despite the horrors of slavery, overall, during the pre-emancipation era, about two-thirds of enslaved families had two parents—far more than today. More recent revisionist work has stressed that, while forced separations were always an important part of the picture, the two-thirds figure remained dominant (Wilma Dunaway is especially handy on this). And this tendency continued into the Jim Crow era, contrary to a false sense one might have of daily life in a black ghetto of the 1930s and ’40s—think Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices or Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land. Namely, it is wrong to suppose that, amid the misery of those neighborhoods, all but a sliver of children grew up without a dad. That is a modern phenomenon, whose current extent—fewer than one in three black children are raised by two parents—would shock even the poorest black folk 100 or even 50 years ago.

A standard reference on the subject by University of Minnesota historian Steven Ruggles in 1994 is most often taken as evidence of the uninteresting—that, gosh, in the old days poor black people didn’t find single parenthood unusual. What is actually more important in its findings is that, from 1880 to 1960, fewer than one in three black children nationwide didn’t grow up with two parents. Another key statistic, from Barbara Agresti in 1978, is that, just past emancipation, in 1870 in Walton County, Florida, about 57 percent of black children lived with two parents; just 15 years later, 89 percent did. Or, as St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton told us in Black Metropolis, in Chicago in the 1920s, it was considered a problem that just one in seven black children were born to single mothers. What’s more, that number went down during the Depression, not up.

When I first arrived on this website, where I've received both a warm and chilling response from differing people, it was through a strong criticism of Glenn Beck. At the height of his Fox News reign, Beck got closer than anyone in the mainstream ever has to really bad nationalism.