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
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 had in it two
parents and was not 'unorganized and disorganized.' “
