Slavery's Long Shadow

"Slavery and the Black Family" by James Q. Wilson, in The Public Interest, 1112 16th St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.

Did slavery weaken the black family?

W. E. B. Du Bois, author of The Negro American Family (1908), was sure that it did, and so was E. Franklin Frazier, author of The Negro Family in the United States (1939). After all, slavery denied slaves the right to marry, denied them the fruits of their own labor, and casually put family members on the auction block. But when Daniel Patrick Moynihan summarized such arguments in his famous 1965 paper, "The Negro Family: A Case for National Action," the "roof fell in on him, and a revisionist historical movement began," notes Wilson, the distinguished political scientist now teaching at Pepperdine University.

In the eyes of the revisionists, slavery was not to blame for the high rate of singleparent families among blacks; contemporary racism and joblessness were. In The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (1976), historian Herbert Gutman, relying largely on genealogies he had constructed, argued that the black family emerged from slavery in good shape, with two parents the norm.

But genealogy is not the same as family, Wilson argues. Every child has two parents; not every child lives in a two-parent family. Yet many scholars embraced Gutman’s work as foundational. In Fatherhood in America: A History (1993), Robert Griswold claims that the black family remained intact until the 20th century, when blacks migrated in large numbers to big cities, where the lack of jobs forced fathers "to leave their families to find work."

"Recent research shows this argument to be wrong," says Wilson. "Based on a careful analysis of census data, historian Steven Ruggles concluded that single parenthood was two to three times more common among African Americans than among whites in 1880 [before the "great migration"]. The gap widened after 1960, but it was only a widening, not a new event." While urban life probably did encourage family breakdown, Wilson says, it was not the main factor. Analyzing census data from 1910, University of Pennsylvania scholars have shown that black children in rural areas were roughly twice as likely as their white counterparts to be raised by a single mother.

The impact of patterns of family life further back in time, in Africa, is very difficult to gauge. In Africa, kinship networks were and are more important than marriage, and the strong extended family left a smaller role for fathers in child rearing. One anthropologist observes that in West Africa the question has been not so much "Are you married?" as "Do you have any children?" Slavery hardly encouraged black men to build nuclear families.

It is important to note, writes Wilson, that about half of all black families today are middle class and, as a group, have overcome "the legacy of slavery, at least with respect to income and family structure." Nevertheless, that pernicious legacy persists. In 1997, nearly 70 percent of children born to African American women had unwed mothers.