Town May Be Single-Parent Capital of U.S. : Michigan: Benton Harbor leads the way to uncertain era of divorce, early widowhood, out-of-wedlock births.

When she got pregnant the first time, at age 15, Rashonda Jackson never considered marriage. Nor did she give much thought to abortion or adoption.

There was never really any doubt about what she would do. With her parents’ blessing and that of her church, Rashonda had a baby boy, Shannon. It was enough to gain her entry into the least exclusive club in Benton Harbor:

Single motherhood.

This could be the single-parent capital of the United States, a struggling Rust Belt town where an astonishing eight of every 10 families are headed by a single parent. The vast majority are single mothers, often in their teens or early 20s.

Look around: The first thing you notice are the children, hordes of them on every street, riding bicycles, dribbling basketballs, running, shouting, just being kids.

Their mothers are often with them. Their fathers, almost never. Fathers, real, live-in fathers, are as scarce as good jobs.

“There’s just not enough men, I guess,” sighed one woman, Joyce White, who is rearing three teen-agers alone. “Well,” she said on second thought, “there’s enough men, but they just don’t accept responsibility.”

Men disagree, of course--what they lack, they say, is work. Either way, Benton Harbor is helping lead the nation into an uncertain era in which divorce, early widowhood and out-of-wedlock births chip away at the nuclear family.

The Census Bureau recently reported a huge increase in the number of American children living with single parents. Nationwide, one of every four children live with only one parent; in more than one-third of those families, the parent has never been married.

At the request of the Associated Press, the Census Bureau conducted a closer, city-by-city analysis of the roughly 3,000 largest cities in the country--all those with more than 4,000 households.

In a ranking of the cities by percentage of single-parent families, Benton Harbor stood at the top of the list. Eighty-three percent of its families with children were headed by a single parent.

(Actually, two retirement communities--Sun City, Ariz., and Holiday City, N.J.--ranked higher, but only because of a statistical quirk. Each had fewer than 10 families with children, and all the families were headed by single parents.)

Detroit; Camden, N.J.; and Tuskegee, Ala., were among other cities in which a majority of families were headed by single parents.

All these cities share certain characteristics: poverty, unemployment, drug use, lots of people on welfare. They also have large black populations.

Single parenthood is actually growing faster among whites, making this one area of American life that is on the road to racial parity. But nationwide, black children are still more than twice as likely as white children to be living with only one parent.

In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan--then an assistant secretary of labor, now a U.S. senator from New York--warned the nation of the consequences of what he viewed as an alarming rate of out-of-wedlock births among black Americans. At the time, the rate was 25%. By the 1990s, the out-of-wedlock birthrate for all Americans had surpassed that; among blacks, it was approaching 70%.

Benton Harbor is 92% black, a town of 12,800 on the shores of Lake Michigan, a straight shot across the water from Chicago. It is also straight across the St. Joseph River from the town of St. Joseph.

St. Joe and Benton Harbor are often referred to as twin cities--if so, they are fraternal, not identical, twins. St. Joseph is 95% white, and as middle-class as Benton Harbor is poor.

Together, they comprise the nucleus of a metropolitan area that is among the most typical, statistically and socially, in the United States, according to American Demographics magazine.

But if Benton Harbor is typical of anything, it is of an inner-city slum. By its appearances, it could be the poorest neighborhood in a mid-size city. Since it isn’t--since it’s an entire city unto itself--it is something of a statistical aberration. There are undoubtedly just as many single parents per capita in parts of New York or Chicago, but those neighborhoods are balanced by other, more affluent, socially stable districts.

“In most communities, you have your wealthy, your middle class and your lower income,” observed Bill Wolf, a former mayor of Benton Harbor. “Unfortunately, Benton Harbor is almost unique in its homogeneity. It’s 80% the same--door to door to door, you’ll find people who are on some kind of welfare.”

Driving through Benton Harbor, it is easy to see what a pleasant, thriving community it once was. There are big old wood-frame houses with wraparound porches, neat little parks and tree-lined streets.

But on some blocks, more houses are boarded up than not. Many are just gone, razed because they had decayed to the point of being hazards. Often as not, the houses that are in good repair are also surrounded by chain-link fences.

The downtown business district has an eerie, swept-clean feeling, as if evacuated in the face of some natural disaster. The most vibrant signs of life downtown are the flowers blooming in the vacant lots.

And Benton Harbor has bounced back, to some extent. Almost everyone says it was worse a few years ago, back when Money magazine named it the worst place to live in America.

The largest employer is the Whirlpool Corp., which once made washing machines here. There also once were foundries, and auto parts suppliers that served the mighty factories in Detroit. There were department stores and family restaurants downtown, and proud homes and overflowing churches in the surrounding neighborhoods.

Most of that is gone.

Whirlpool is still headquartered in Benton Harbor, but its washing machines are made elsewhere. What’s left are mostly white-collar jobs for which few people in Benton Harbor are qualified.

The foundries went; so did most of the auto suppliers; so did the department stores; so did the restaurants. The churches are still here, but they’ve lost a lot of their members. And some people say they’ve lost their spiritual path as well.

This is a town that’s been brought to its knees.

No one is quite sure when the families began to dissolve, but the rise in single parenthood has mirrored the decline in the economy. Most people put a lot of blame on the welfare system, which penalizes recipients who marry. That, and widespread joblessness, made a mockery of the notion of a family breadwinner.

Attitudes changed too. The sexual revolution of the 1960s, coupled with the increased independence of women, removed the stigma of “illegitimacy” and gave women the confidence to strike out on their own.

People in Benton Harbor talk a lot about the changes. Few think they were, on balance, for the better.

“There’s no shame anymore,” said Audrey Hale, the director of Project Together, a program that tries to pull women out of welfare. “It used to be a shame to have children out of wedlock. That’s not true anymore.”

“There used to be more responsibility in a lot of black homes,” said Tony Mitchell, a Benton Harbor native who runs an anti-poverty agency, Communities First. “We have a generation of parents and grandparents who have lost control. We have a generation of churches and ministers that have lost their communities.”

Mitchell’s agency surveyed Benton Harbor residents to find out how they ranked the town’s biggest problems.

No. 1: Children having children.

What is striking about talking to single parents here is the extent to which marriage and children have become separated. It’s not just that marriage doesn’t always precede children; it’s almost as if there’s no link between the two.

A group of single mothers sit around a conference table at Project Together on Main Street. This program, begun here six years ago, hires former welfare mothers to serve as mentors for women who feel trapped in the welfare cycle. If there’s a theme in the conversation of these women, it’s that the men in their lives have let them down.

“A lot of these males out here, they don’t want to work. They’re just out for the easy money, the fast money,” says Cornelia Davenport, a wide-eyed, broad-faced mother of two. Her son, Fredrick, draws figures on the conference-room blackboard.

“My kids, I love them. . . . They see their father from time to time. I don’t care if he helps out or not.”

There’s only one thing she expects from him, Davenport says. She wants him to be a positive role model for his children.

Is he?

“No.”

Another mother, Sharon Chandler, speaks. She is an intense young woman with two nose rings, an easy laugh and a steel will. Her former boyfriend hit her on three occasions, she says; all three times, she went to jail for fighting back--with a knife.

She had two children by two fathers before she was 20, and describes Benton Harbor High School as “Maternity High” during her years there.

“I’m going to tell you all what I think it all boils down to,” Chandler says.

“Go ahead, girl,” someone says.

“Why milk the cow when you can get the milk for free?”

That could be taken several ways. Chandler explains she is referring to men who bed down with women who demand nothing in return.

As for herself, she has demanded child support from the father of her youngest child. She says he is in prison for failure to pay.

“I’m glad he’s doing time,” she adds. “I’m not sorry.”

About a mile away from Project Together’s bright, spacious office, men cluster on a cement walkway leading into a low-slung brick housing project. One, a retired machinist who gives his name as Ken Parnell, glares with unsuppressed rage when asked why there are so many single parents in Benton Harbor.

“Because black men can’t get no jobs,” he says, almost spitting the words. “Because white men got all the jobs sewed up. Because black women get on welfare and run the men out of the house. . . . How can you take care of your family if you can’t get a job? That’s it in a nutshell.”

Parnell is a big man, still muscular at age 53, a man who says he worked two jobs to rear a family of eight. He has lived in Benton Harbor since 1981.

“It was down when I got here; it’s gone down even more. Young brothers killing each other, shoot you if you look at them wrong. And it’s kind of sad but it’s understandable. They don’t see nothin’ to look forward to. Young (men) don’t even smile. Sell some dope, dodge some bullets, that’s what it’s all about. Young tykes don’t even have nothin’ to look forward to.”

With that, he gets in his son’s car and drives away. Mad.

Catherine Jackson, a 41-year-old bus driver, knows what her mother would have said if she had become pregnant out of wedlock in her teens. “I know she would have told me to get married,” Jackson says.

When her daughter, Rashonda, became pregnant in her teens, Jackson didn’t tell her to get married. She decided to support whatever decision her daughter made and trust her instincts. Rashonda, she says, was always a responsible girl.

Now, Jackson and her husband help care for their two grandsons. “They really think my father is their father instead of their grandfather,” Rashonda says.

Rashonda is lithe, bright-eyed, with little whorls of hair plastered like appliques to her scalp. At first, she admits, she was overwhelmed by motherhood. But five years into it, she is beginning to exude the quiet confidence bestowed by maturity. She doesn’t feel too young to be a mother. And she has goals: college, a good job, a better life for her kids.

Rashonda is asked if she might marry. Someday, she says.

“I’m just not ready right now,” she adds with a little giggle. It seems left over from the adolescence she so quickly lost.

“I’m just not old enough,” she says.