The voice of black conservatives
Its significance for our times
Kendall Qualls is Founder and President of TakeCharge, a non-profit organization dedicated to the development of a back-to-basics movement in black society that seeks to rebuild a functional black culture and restore hope and pride. He recently published an article, “A Movement for Revival and Restoration,” in Journal of Free Black Thought.
“A Movement for Revival and Restoration” begins by noting that March 2025 marks the sixtieth anniversary of the controversial Moynihan Report on The Negro Family, which maintained that high non-marital birth rates among black Americans—24% in 1965—were contributing to the development of a matriarchal society that weakened the role of black men. It cautioned that social welfare programs were eroding family structures and undermining the exercise of responsibility by men as husbands and fathers.
Qualls observes that the implications of the Report, written by U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, were ignored by black leaders and the broader society. I would add that there was at the time a counter argument which maintained that a strong extended family among blacks reduced the negative consequences of non-marital births, and in addition, there frequently was present a male who functioned as husband/father. Moynihan was accused of having assumed that the two-parent nuclear family, which was a norm at that time for white society, was ideal for all cultures.
But it is hard to deny the validity of Qualls’ point. He maintains that, six decades later, it is evident that Moynihan’s concerns and projections were in essence on target. Today, only 24% of black families have two parents in the home. In addition, 59% of African-American mothers have children from different fathers, which is the highest rate among all ethnic groups, and it is correlated with the intergenerational transmission of indices of disadvantage.
Qualls maintains that the breakdown of the nuclear family is the primary cause of many social problems in black America. He notes that in his home state of Minnesota, blacks are 8.3% of the population, but they account for 66% of criminal homicides, a disparity that is found throughout the country. And he points out that homicide is the leading cause of death among blacks less than twenty years of age, and that the homicide rate among black children and teenagers is the highest of all ethnic groups in the United States.
Qualls holds black leaders and institutions responsible for this situation. He specifically criticizes the Congressional Black Caucus, the NAACP, the National Urban League, and Black Lives Matter for failing to address the collapse of the two-parent family as the principal cause of the social problems that plague black society. He criticizes black pastors for not challenging the practices and policies of the Democratic Party.
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A Declaration of Revival and Redemption
TakeCharge calls upon the descendants of American black slaves to sign “A Declaration of Revival and Redemption.” The Declaration denounces “the misguided leadership of legacy Civil Rights organizations, which have pursued power, wealth, and status at the expense of the people they are meant to serve.” It notes that social welfare programs since the 1960s have incentivized single-parent homes, provoking a decline of traditional two-parent black families from 80% to 23%, which leads to higher levels of poverty, criminal activity, physical and sexual abuse, poor academic performance, and drug or alcohol abuse. The Declaration lists eight proposed tactics for cultural change.
I provide here the Declaration in its entirety.
We the People, descendants of American black slaves, hereby make a public declaration to recommit to our Christian faith and heritage. In so doing, we denounce the misguided leadership of legacy Civil Rights organizations, which have pursued power, wealth, and status at the expense of the people they are meant to serve.
Whereas the traditional two-parent black family has been decimated to near extinction, from approximately 80 percent two-parent families to 23 percent present day.
Whereas the implementation of social welfare programs that began in the 1960s and have continued to financially incentivize single-parent homes while disadvantaging the traditional nuclear family, despite overwhelming evidence revealing that children from single-parent homes face severe challenges. These challenges include a higher likelihood of poverty, criminal activity, suffering physical and sexual abuse, performing poorly academically, abusing alcohol or drugs, having children out of wedlock, and often leading difficult lives that negatively impact themselves and their communities.
Whereas public schools that serve poor minority communities have experienced a sharp decline in academic achievement and are on record for the lowest outcomes in decades while allowing anti-social behaviors to skyrocket.
Whereas black people from around the world clamor to call themselves American citizens, with the exception of native-born black Americans who have been indoctrinated with knowledge of the past sins of America but have little to no knowledge of its virtues.
Whereas our ancestors fertilized America with their blood, sweat, and tears. We owe it to them to live lives worthy of their sacrifice. Therefore, we pledge, under the TakeCharge banner and our local affiliations, to work to restore the black community to its historical roots by teaching our children the importance of faith, merit, hard work, integrity, the value of free-market enterprise, and the privilege of calling ourselves American citizens.
Therefore, we openly renounce allegiance to legacy Civil Rights organizations including newer organizations such as Black Lives Matter, which do not represent the best interests of black Americans. For decades, they have raised millions of dollars while the nuclear family collapsed along with the functional black culture. For more than 50 years, they have not introduced one national initiative to reverse the decline of two-parent families.
These organizations have also failed the black community by obstructing the main pathway out of poverty, which is a quality education. They actively and passively obstruct school choice initiatives in failing school districts across the country.
For these reasons and more, we urge local, regional, and national philanthropic organizations to shift support to organizations that work for the good of the black community by restoring two-parent families, committed to academic excellence, and a return to the traditional Christian faith.
This initiative is long-overdue but essential. We ask fellow Americans to support this national initiative and pray for its success.
Tactics for Cultural Change
1. Support School Choice policies that allow tax dollars to “follow” the student.
2. Return vocational and technical education to public schools so that participating seniors graduate workforce ready.
3. Require middle and high school students to pass the U.S. Citizenship test prior to graduation.
4. Add curriculum into middle and high school that teaches the historical truths of socialism and communism in comparison to capitalism.
5. Encourage entrepreneurial clubs and activities beginning in middle-school.
6. Modify tax policies that incentivize marriage and the nuclear family.
7. Educate the community on the benefits of marriage before children and make it a priority in nonprofit organizations, academic centers and media communication companies serving the black community.
8. Permanently revise public welfare policies that grandfathers existing recipients into their current plans but require new enrollees a 5–7-year maximum allowance.
All who are descendants of American black slaves are invited to sign the document electronically. The Declaration can be found here.
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Black conservatism
In my work in writing my Substack commentaries, I have come across various black conservative thinkers, whose work I have discussed in various posts. John McWhorter, professor of linguistics at Columbia University, for example, has criticized the anti-racist ideology of Ibram Kendi for assuming that all racial inequalities are due to racism, when in fact certain cultural tendencies in black society are explanatory factors, as is evident from a vantage point of common-sense intelligence. Adolph Reed Jr., professor emeritus of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, also has written against race-reductionist arguments, maintaining that they obscure the true and far more complex sources of socioeconomic inequalities. Reed has maintained that race reductionist arguments persist, in spite of their inadequacy, because the new antiracist ideology is the product of an anti-leftist politics that promotes the interests of the black professional/managerial class.
Similarly, Shelby Steele, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, has argued that blacks have put themselves forward as continued victims in order to obtain concessions to black demands, thus turning themselves into perpetual victims trading on their victimization. He writes that this process converts “black suffering into a moral power to be wielded, rather than a condition to be overcome. This is the power that blacks discovered in the ’60s. It gained us a War on Poverty, affirmative action, school busing, public housing and so on. But it also seduced us into turning our identity into a virtual cult of victimization—as if our persecution was our eternal flame, the deepest truth of who we are, a tragic fate we trade on. After all, in an indifferent world, it may feel better to be the victim of a great historical injustice than a person left out of history when that injustice recedes.” Although politically and psychologically useful, the victimization posture is out of sync with reality. Writing before the emission of Executive Orders eliminating DEI by Donald Trump, Steel wrote that “we blacks aren’t much victimized any more. . .. Today we are far more likely to encounter racial preferences than racial discrimination.” The victim-focused identity is an anachronism.
Robert Woodson has been a long-time critic of the post-1965 civil rights organizations. He has maintained that they seek funds from the white establishment, ostensibly for the purpose of improving black social and economic conditions; but the strategy functions above all to promote the expansion of a professional class of race specialists. He has written of a race-grievance industry with specialists who have an interest in exaggerating social problems, in order to justify funds. And they have an interest in the perpetuation of social problems in the black community, in order to maintain the need for their brand of race specialists. Therefore, the race specialists, not having an interest in the uplift of the poor, have paid insufficient attention to the education of poor black people with respect to the practical skills, attitudes, and discipline that they need to improve their condition.
Woodson, who during the 1970s directed the Urban League’s Administration of Justice Division, founded in 1981 the Woodson Center, which seeks to help residents of low-income neighborhoods to address their problems. In response to the “1619 Project” of The New York Times, the Woodson Center established “1776 United.” Its mission statement declares: “We dissent from contemporary groupthink and rhetoric about race, class, and American history that defames our national heritage, divides our people, and instills helplessness among those who already hold within themselves the grit and resilience to better their lot in life.” The program of 1776 United rejects the use of racism as a catch-all explanation for black problems; it advocates alliances between blacks and whites and others in resolving American social problems.
John McWhorter, mentioned above, also criticized the 1619 Project. He maintained that the project was the result of the self-doubt and insecurity of the black intelligentsia, and it made them feel self-important. He wrote that the project is “a kind of performance art,” in which facts are less important than attitude. The project is “all about personality, a certain persona that all are encouraged to adopt as a modern version of being a civil rights warrior. For this 2.0 version of a civil rights warrior, authentic blackness, significant blackness, requires eternal opposition, bitter indignation, and claims of being owed.” Whether or not this posture can change reality is of secondary concern. The important thing is that all of this be expressed, giving rise to “a caste among the oppressed who, in all sincerity, mistake performance for activism.”
For Woodson, the rich history of black achievement is being glossed over in exchange for a permanent sense of grievance. Black achievement in the past was based on values like family, faith, education, entrepreneurship, hard work, patience, and perseverance. For decades after emancipation, the strong social fabric of black institutions like families, churches, schools, and other social institutions provided the support that individuals needed to achieve. What undermines black achievement today is not systemic racism but the erosion of black mediating institutions and the assault on the values that are the key to success.
Woodson was one of three guests on a Heritage Foundation program on “The Black Experience in America” in July 2022. He maintained that in the period of segregation between the Civil War and the 1960s, African Americans had important achievements in education, employment, and income, and they built strong neighborhoods characterized by family stability, active churches, and street safety. These achievements were attained despite patterns of segregation, discrimination, and the denial of political and civil rights. They were attained on a foundation of determination to succeed combined with the institutional support of family and church.
Woodson reported that he never heard a gun fired when he was growing up in a low-income black neighborhood in Philadelphia in the 1940s and 1950s. At that time, 98% of households had a man and woman present raising children. He never heard of an elderly person being mugged in the neighborhood; and he never heard of a child being shot. Black Americans had the highest marriage rate of any sector of American society. Elderly people could walk safely in black neighborhoods. All this at a time when racism was enshrined in law.
Woodson noted that, although African Americans thrived in the period of segregation, the greatest declines have come in the subsequent period of desegregation. The reduction in black poverty during the 1940s and 1950s came to a halt in the 1960s with the War on Poverty, when there was a dramatic change in the composition of families. One hundred years of segregation did not destroy black families, but in the last fifty years, black families have rapidly deteriorated.
In support of this observation, Woodson quoted Thomas Sowell, who had written that the black poverty rate fell from 87% in 1940 to 47% by 1960. In 1960, 78% of black children were raised in two-parent families; but by 1990, 30 years after the creation of the liberal welfare state, 66% of black children were raised by a single parent.
In the aftermath of the death of George Floyd, as the wave of passion with respect to police conduct unfolded, there were principled black scholars who challenged the prevailing rhetoric. One was Glenn Loury, Professor of Economics at Brown University. In a February 10, 2021, article in Quillette, “Unspeakable Truths about Racial Inequality in America,” Loury writes:
There are about 1,200 fatal shootings of people by the police in the US each year, according to the carefully documented database kept by the Washington Post which enumerates, as best it can determine, every single instance of a fatal police shooting. Roughly 300 of those killed are African Americans, about one-fourth, while blacks are about 13 percent of the population. So that’s an over-representation, though still far less than a majority of the people who are killed. More whites than blacks are killed by police in the country every year. You wouldn’t know that from the activists’ rhetoric.
Loury observes that the killing of 1200 people per year is too many, so this is an issue that ought to be analyzed and discussed. “Still, we need to bear in mind that this is a country of more than 300 million people with scores of concentrated urban areas where police interact with citizens. Tens of thousands of arrests occur daily in the United States. So, these events—which are extremely regrettable and often do not reflect well on the police—are, nevertheless, quite rare.”
Seeking to further put the issue of police killing of blacks in a larger context, Loury notes that
there are about 17,000 homicides in the United States every year, nearly half of which involve black perpetrators. The vast majority of those have other blacks as victims. For every black killed by the police, more than 25 other black people meet their end because of homicides committed by other blacks. This is not to ignore the significance of holding police accountable for how they exercise their power vis-à-vis citizens. It is merely to notice how very easy it is to overstate the significance and the extent of this phenomenon, precisely as the Black Lives Matter activists have done.
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Black conservatives and the MAGA movement
In my February 25 commentary, I undertook a Marxist analysis of the MAGA movement. I maintained that when governments of and for the people implement a platform of improving national economic productivity in defense of the needs of the people against the historic usurpation of the elite, said governments possess characteristics anticipated by Marxist theory in a worldwide transition to socialism. With respect to the United States, I defined the people as consisting of workers, entrepreneurs, blacks, middle America, legal immigrants and their descendants of all ethnic groups and colors, and the lower middle class, who must forge a unified struggle against the elite and their urban upper-middle-class allies in the defense of the economy and the culture of the nation. And I noted that all these sectors of the people voted in 2024 in significant numbers for the Trump-Vance Republican Party ticket, except for blacks, who were led astray by black politicians and activists who put forth strategies in defense of the black middle class, ignoring the needs of the black lower class as well as the broader working class and other popular sectors of the nation, and ignoring as well the development of the national economy.
“The people reclaim the republic: A true-Marxist analysis of the MAGA movement,” February 25, 2025
In today’s commentary we have looked at Kendal Qualls and TakeCharge, placing its call for black revival and restoration alongside the critiques of the prevailing tendencies of black leaders and activists that have been put forth by conservative black intellectuals. Such black conservative voices imply the real possibility for the emergence of a new leadership in black society, which moves away from a black-middle-class discourse that is allied with the elite and the urban upper middle class, that returns to the principles and concepts of the African-American movement of 1919-1972 and 1983-1988, and that casts its fate with the hopes of the majority of the people of the United States in the renewal of the American Republic. Such a return to the source in black society could strengthen the MAGA coalition and enable the consolidation of the MAGA movement as the reigning political paradigm of the next decades.
As I have done with all my posts on the MAGA Movement, I would like to remind that, in spite of important steps in defense of the people, the national economy, and the national culture, the MAGA Movement lacks a persistent anti-imperialist consciousness, which, if not overcome, will surely lead the movement and the Trump administration to significant errors. Already we are seeing that the Trump administration is continuing the unconventional war against Cuba and Venezuela, which has negative consequences for the U.S. national economy. To be sure, unwinnable unconventional wars do not have the same high costs as direct military intervention or funding proxy wars. But they have considerable costs in the form of lost commerce and declining prestige in the world. Unconventional war against recalcitrant states in Latin America is imperialist overreach, because said countries have the capacity to persist in their sovereign road. It would be more consistent with U.S. interests for the Trump administration to declare a new era of peaceful coexistence with Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, just as it is doing with respect to Russia.
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Further considerations
For most of the twentieth century, the black community was the nation’s most important voice in defense of the principles and concepts of social justice, speaking in defense of the needs of black people and the interests of the larger nation. But the black movement lost its way. It was led astray by black politicians and activists who promoted only black middle-class interests. They constructed an artificial division between the oppressed and the privileged, not knowing that nearly all living humans today are descended from persons who suffered the indignities of forced labor in one form or another. However, in the midst of this unfortunate and destructive turn, there have been those, called black conservatives (combining ethnicity and ideology into a single designation), who have grasped the essence and the character of the black experience in America. If they can lead the black community toward a return to its roots in patriotism, Christian faith, and social justice in the true sense, and if they can cast their lot with the movement currently being forged by the working class and other popular sectors of the broader society, it would enable a nation-wide consensus on the principles that ought to guide our nation. Consensus is greatly needed, because we are a sorely divided people in the current historic moment. It must, however, be a consensus that is not imperialist. It must be a consensus that seeks cooperation with the other peoples of the earth. We the people of the United States must arrive to appreciate that, however exceptional our achievements, we remain, and will always be, an inseparable part of humanity.
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