Word: gutman
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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...
...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...
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...
...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...