Black Families: Surviving Slavery

The 1965 Moynihan report was one of the boldest documents on the American race problem--and one of the most divisive. In it Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel P. Moynihan, now Senator-elect from New York, argued that economic aid alone could not bring equality for blacks in America. His reason: the black family, marked by female-headed households, high illegitimacy and absent fathers, had been destroyed by slavery and left trapped in "a tangle of pathology" that impeded real progress for black Americans.

The report was denounced for a variety of reasons by many angry blacks, but Moynihan's analysis of the black family was a conventional one for its time. Scholars and political leaders alike depicted blacks as demoralized victims of racism. As late as 1966, Martin Luther King Jr. could declare: "The shattering blows on the Negro family have made it fragile, deprived and often psychopathic."

That kind of rhetoric soon disappeared as blacks and increasing numbers of scholars, black and white, stressed the achievements of black families. Now Moynihan's basic premise--that slavery destroyed black family structure--has apparently been laid to rest by City University of New York Historian Herbert G. Gutman in his new book, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925. Gutman's conclusion: from the earliest days of slavery until the eve of the Great Depression, the black family was surprisingly close, strong and intact.

By analyzing slave registers, marriage records during Reconstruction and later census data, Gutman found that the two-parent household and long-lasting marriages have been typical among blacks for most of their American experience. In the slave quarters, marital fidelity was highly regarded and defended, but premarital sex was tolerated, and no stigma was attached to illegitimacy. Except when marriages were broken by the sale of one spouse, the clear tendency was for stable, long-lasting slave marriages. In some cases, marriages even survived successful escapes by one spouse. Gutman quotes a Natchez, Miss., slave overseer who said that slaves who outran the owners' dogs would usually stay in the vicinity and risk recapture to see their families again.

Fictive Aunts. Slaves, unlike their owners, says Gutman, almost never married their cousins, suggesting that blacks were not emulating white marriage customs but possibly following ancient West African kinship patterns. Other records indicate a strong sense of family: children were commonly named after parents and grandparents, and slaves often retained the last name of their former slaveowner to keep alive the sense of black family solidarity. When wholesale shifting of slaves broke up families, blacks tended to create fictive aunt, uncle and cousin relationships to keep the kinship ideal alive.

Gutman finds the same strong sense of marriage and the extended family (including grandparents, cousins and other relatives) in the postwar years and well into the 20th century. By 1925, says Gutman, migration and urbanization had shifted many tasks of the basic family unit to the extended family, "but at all times--and in all settings--the typical black household (always a lower-class household) had in it two parents and was not 'unorganized and disorganized.' "

No Tinkering. Gutman took his study only to 1925 and many experts insist that black family structure is still reasonably strong in 1976. For example, Sociologist Joyce Ladner and Anthropologist Carol Stack report that single-parent households among the urban black poor are often part of flexible extended families that protect the young and preserve family continuity.

Other sociologists, however, grumble privately that academics are now simply telling blacks what they want to hear. Says one: "It's just nonsense to say that poor black families are nice sturdy institutions. Scholars know they are going to be attacked by black leaders if they don't come down on the right side." While conceding that it was not slavery that weakened the structure of black families, the Moynihan advocates say that post-1925 migration to the north and urbanization took a terrible toll, and that Moynihan's characterization of the black family today remains essentially correct. Says Moynihan: "Gutman's thesis does not centrally affect my own."

Gutman disagrees. He argues that Moynihan's false history of black home life led to a dangerous policy recommendation: the Moynihan report's startling call for the Government to help restructure black families. Though no program was spelled out in the report, Moynihan wanted to shore up the role of males in the black family. One of his ideas: every able-bodied black man should have a job, even if it meant reducing employment of black women. But Gutman thinks that because the severe problems of black families go back only to the Depression, they can be met by more employment and traditional economic aid. "There just isn't any evidence," he says, "to justify tinkering around with black families." His point: given the crippling pressures of unemployment and racism, it seems apparent that no alternate family structure would have worked better for blacks. Says Gutman: "The Moynihan report was the last hurrah for the idea that there is one right way to organize family life."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.