Abstract
Eleanor Holmes Norton, in talking about her family, remembers that the back door and backyards of her grandmother and her aunt faced the backyard of her parents’ home, allowing her to run back and forth all the time. She was able to know her grandmother and her cousins intimately, living in an extended network of family members. She credits her grandmother, especially, with setting a standard—and doing so in a way that reflected wisdom. Returning from the errand that sent her to a local store to buy lamb chops when she was a mere seven years old, her grandmother said:
“Eleanor, tell me about how you got him to give you these chops.” This was when the Safeway had an actual butcher behind the counter. And I said, “Well, he asked me which did I want, and I said, ‘I don’t want that one, I want this one and this one.’” … In the summer and spring after school I would often sit with my grandmother on the front porch and there were some orange and green chairs, rocking chairs, and we’d rock and everybody goes by, [she] knows everybody, and you pass the news of the day. And the news of the day for days running was, “Let me tell you what this child did today. Well, I sent her to the Safeway and the man— she’d never been before—this was her first time. And when it came to choosing lamb chops and you know how difficult that is to do,” she would say, “This is what the child said—” Now, here I am sitting there rocking with grandmother, looking at her, listening to her brag on me that way. … She told other people about it. And somehow that said to me, “Well, my goodness, that’s a standard.” I think it said to me that is a standard I must try to meet more often.2
When I see what has happened to children today, the importance of family to the survival of black people over the centuries and decades becomes more—becomes clearer to me than ever. When you consider that African Americans had nothing but their family and their church—the government not only didn’t care about them but was working against them—and you see what’s happened to so many black children today, then you have special appreciation for your own family.1 —Eleanor Holmes Norton
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Notes
Andrew Billingsley, Black Families in White America (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1968), 21.
David Popenoe, “American Family Decline, 1960–1990: A Review and Appraisal,” Journal of Marriage and Family, Vol. 55, No. 3 (Aug. 1993), 527–542;
Frances Goldscheider and Linda Waite, New Families, No Families?: The Transformation of the American Home (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991);
Jay MacLeod, Ain’t No Makin’ It. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, Inc, 1987), 50–60;
William J. Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987). For further discussion on this issue see,
Maxine Baca Zinn, “Feminism and Family Studies for a New Century,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 571 (2000), 42–56;
Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992).
For further discussion of these themes, see Linda Chatters, Robert Joseph Taylor, and Rukmalie Jayakody, “Fictive Kinship Relations in Black Extended Families,” Journal of Comparative Family Studies, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Autumn 1994), 297–312;
Shirley A. Hill and Joey Sprague, “Parenting in Black and White Families: The Interaction of Gender with Race and Class,” Gender and Society, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Aug. 1999), 480–502;
Elmer P. Martin and Joanne Mitchell Martin, The Black Extended Family (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1978);
Wade Nobles, “African American Family Life: An Instrument of Culture,” in Harriette Pipes McAdoo, ed., Black Families (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc., 2007), 69–78.
Nobles, “African American Family Life: An Instrument of Culture,” in Black Families; Niara Sudarkasa, “An Exposition of the Value Premises underlying Black Family Studies,” Journal of the National Medical Association. Vol. 19 (May 1975), 235–239; Niara Sudarkasa, “Interpreting the African Heritage in Afro-American Family Organization,” in Black Families, 29–47. White families honor blood (or consanguineal) ties but also place primary emphasis on relational ties via marriage, while black families tend to reinforce the centrality of the family based on multigenerational blood ties.
Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom: 1750–1925 (New York: Random House, 1976), 201–204;
Frank Furstenberg, “The Making of the Black Family: Race and Class in Qualitative Studies in the Twentieth Century,” Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 33 (2007), 432;
Leanor Boulin Johnson and Robert Staples, Black Families at the Crossroads: Challenges and Prospects (San Francisco. CA: Jossey-Bass. 2005), 251.
Johnson and Staples, ibid.; Karen Hansen, Not-So-Nuclear Families: Class, Gender and Networks of Care (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005);
Carol Stack, All Our Kin (New York: Basic Books, 1974).
Robert Joseph Taylor, Linda M. Chatters, M. Belinda Tucker, and Edith Lewis, “Developments in Research on Black Families: A Decade Review,” Journal of Marriage and the Family, Vol. 52, No. 4, (Nov., 1990), 997.
Amiri Baraka, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (Chicago, IL: Lawrence Hill Books, 1984), 11–22 passim.
bell hooks, “Revolutionary Parenting,” in Karen Hansen and Anita Garey, eds., Families in the U.S.: Kinship and Domestic Policies (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. 1998). 587–596.
Linda Chatters, Robert Joseph, and Rukmalie Jayakody, “Fictive Kinship Relations in Black Extended Families,” Journal of Comparative Family Studies, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Autumn 1994), 301–303.
For further documentation of these ideas, see Andrew Billingley, Climbing Jacob’s Ladder (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 30–35; Johnson and Staples, Black Families at the Crossroads, 245–246; Taylor et al., “Developments in Research on Black Families,” Journal of Marriage and Family (1990), 1000.
Patricia Reid-Merritt, Sister Power: How Phenomenal Black Women Are Rising to the Top (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1996), 39–42.
Johnnetta Cole, Conversations: Straight Talk with America’s Sister President (New York: Doubleday. 1993). 9–10.
Pamela P. Martin and Harriette Pipes McAdoo, “Sources of Racial Socialization: Theological Orientation of African American Churches and Parents,” in Black Families, 4th edition. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc., 2007), 126ff.
Billingsley, Climbing Jacob’s Ladder, 223–227; Nobles, “African American Family Life,” in Black Families, 74–76; Stephanie I. Coard and Robert M. Sellers, “African American Families as a Context for Racial Socialization,” in Vonnie C. McLoyd, Nancy E. Hill, and Kenneth A. Dodge, eds., African American Family Life: Ecological and Cultural Diversity (New York: Guilford Press, 2005), 264–267; Martin and McAdoo, “Sources of Racial Socialization,” Black Families, 132–133.
Lionel D. Scott Jr. “The Relation of Racial Identity and Racial Socialization to Coping with Discrimination among African American Adolescents,” Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Mar. 2003), 520–538.
Aldon Morris and Naomi Braine, “Social Movements and Oppositional Consciousness,” in Oppositional Consciousness: The Subjective Roots of Social Protest (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago, Press, 2001), 22;
Cedric Johnson, Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 42–43, 53–54, 71.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Boston: Beford/St. Martin’s, 1997), 38.
Lois Benjamin, Three Black Generations at the Crossroads (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Litdefield, 2007); Hill and Sprague, “Parenting in Black and White Families,” Gender and Society (1999), 480–502; Billingsley Climbing Jacob’s Ladder.
Carter Savage, “‘Because We Did More with Less’: The Agency of African American Teachers in Franklin, Tennessee: 1890–1967,” Peabody Journal of Education, Vol. 76, No. 2 (Jan. 2001), 170–203;
Michael Herndon and Joan Hirt, “Black Students and Their Families: What Leads to Success in College,” Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 34, No. 4 (Mar. 2004), 489–513.
Robert Bernard Hill, The Strengths of African American Families (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, Inc, 1999); Hill and Sprague, “Parenting in Black and White Families,” Gender and Society, (1999), 480–502; Johnson and Staples, Black Families at the Crossroads, 262–264.
Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: the Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: Amistad, 2006), 101; Savage, “Because We Did More with Less,” Peabody Journal of Education (2001), 170–203.
E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1939).
See also Norman R. Yetman, “Patterns of Ethnic Integration in America,” in Norman Yetman, ed., Majority and Minority: The Dynamics of Race and Ethnicity in American Life, (Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 1999), 227–271.
Anthony M. Platt, “Introduction,” in E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), xxv. Platt’s introduction offers a thoughtful overview of Frazier’s work, placing it in historiographical context with other works and trends.
Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers. 1944) Vol. II 930–931.
Daniel P. Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington, D.C.: Office of Policy Planning and Research, 1965).
http://www.dol.gov/oasam/programs/history/moynchapter4.htm. Moynihan’s view was supported and reinforced by Jessie Bernard, widely cited as one of the founders of family sociology. He argued that black female-headed families reflected a distinctly black adherence to hedonistic lifestyles. See Bernard, Marriage and Family among Negroes (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966).
William J. Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1978);
William J. Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: the Innter City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
See, for example, Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005);
Sharon Hays, Flat Broke with Children (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003);
Karyn Lacy, Blue-Chip Black: Race, Class, and Status in the New Black Middle Class (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007);
Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race and Family Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003);
Mary Pattillo-McCoy, Black Picket Fences (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999);
Debra Van Ausdale and Joe Feagin, The First R: How Children Learn Race and Racism (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2001).
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© 2014 Phyllis Leffler
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Leffler, P. (2014). Families: Extended and Fictive Kin, Racial Socialization, Diligence. In: Black Leaders on Leadership. Palgrave Studies in Oral History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137342515_3
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