The Black underclass Book

Herbert George Gutman (1928–1985) was professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

He wrote in the Introduction to this 1974 book, “This volume… was stimulated by the bitter public and academic controversy surrounding Daniel P. Moynihan’s ‘The Negro Family In America: The Case for National Action.’ … the controversy between Moynihan and his critics sparked a preliminary study in 1967-1968, which led to this book… that early study… tested the historical arguments on which the ‘Moynihan Report’ rested. Our objective was simple: if enslavement caused the widespread development among African-Americans of ‘a fatherless matrifocal … family’… such a condition should have been even more common among urban African-Americans closer in time to slavery. The ‘tangle of pathology’ should have been as severe (if not more severe) in 1850 and 1860 as it was in 1950 and 1960.

“[We] studied the Buffalo, New York black community… These Buffalo lower-class blacks bore no visible relationship to an alleged ‘tangle of pathology.’ … This study is an examination of the Afro-American family prior to and after the general emancipation, but it is also a study of the cultural beliefs and behavior of a distinctive lower-class population. It examines its adaptive capacities at critical moments in its history. Slavery is viewed as an oppressive circumstance that tested the adaptive capacities of several generations of man and women.”

He notes, “Most of the registrants [he studied]… were unskilled laborers and farm hands, not servants and artisans, a fact that contradicts the assertion that double-headed households had existed mostly among ‘elite’ slaves. Much that flaws the study of slaves and ex-slaves flows from this belief… These misconceptions accompany another erroneous belief: that when slaves did honor the two-parent household they did so either as a result of the encouragement offered to ‘favored’ slaves by owners or because of daily contact between whites and slave servants and artisans… permitted these few slaves to ‘imitate’ marriage ‘models’ common among owners and other whites. Implicit in such arguments, none of which rests on significant evidence, is the assumption that such ‘models’ were infrequent among the slaves themselves.” (Pg. 13)

He observes, “That many distinguished between prenuptial intercourse and ‘licentiousness’ and believed prenuptial intercourse and pregnancy compatible with settled marriage escaped the notice of all but a few observers.” (Pg. 43)

He summarizes. “Enslavement denied Africans and their many Afro-American descendants essential choice available to much better-situated eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century Americans. An elderly ex-slave put it well in the 1930s. ‘White folks,’ he observed, ‘do as they please, and the darkies do as they can.’ … He meant that [enslavement] narrowed the choices slaves could make.” (Pg. 99)

He comments, “Here was the male-absent slave household that E. Franklin Frazier and so many others content was the common plantation family, ‘the maternal family’ … Their presence convinced the historian Kenneth Stampp that ‘the typical slave family was matriarchal in form.’ Together with many others, Frazier and Stampp confuse a statistically significant fact---the presence of some male-absent slave households---with the characteristic, or typical, domestic arrangement, an error that wrenches the male-absent household from its slave cultural context.” (Pg. 116)

Of ex-slaves entering Virginia in 1862-1863, he states, “Although nearly half of the couples had gone without any marriage ritual sponsored by a white, seven in ten District registrants had lived together for at least a decade. Family solidarity did not need the social cement associated with the prescribed civil and religious norms of the national (or even the regional) culture. These marriages derived their strength from norms within the slave culture itself.” (Pg. 273)

He points out, “Not all sexual ties between slave women and white men were exploitative, and not all interracial contacts between slaves, ex-slaves, and free persons involved black women and white men. The wartime and early postwar records detail isolated but nevertheless significant instances of slave women and white owners deeply attached to one another.” (Pg. 389)

In the 1880s. “Most southern black women headed neither households not subfamilies. Far greater numbers of unmarried black women under thirty, for example, lived with their parents than headed households. The ‘three-generation’ male-absent household (a mother, her daughter, and the daughter’s children), considered the archetypal ‘matrifocal’ family, hardly existed among southern rural and urban blacks. Far greater numbers of elderly black women lived with their husbands or their married children than in such households.” (Pg. 445)

He says, “Central Harlem may not have been Mecca in the missile 1920s. But neither was it Sodom. No evidence whatsoever sustains the assertion in Gilbert Osofsky’s ‘Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto’ that ‘the slave heritage, bulwarked by economic conditions, continued into the twentieth century to make family instability a common factor in Negro life.’ And that is so because such large numbers of lower-class southern black migrants had adapted familial and kin ties---rooted in their prior historical experiences first as slaves and afterward as free rural southern workers and farmers---to life in the emerging ghetto.” (Pg. 455)

He summarizes, “Urban unemployment and underemployment greeted those driven from the [southern] land. The cities had too few jobs… The nonwhite subemployment rate was 21.6 percent, three times the white percent. Subemployment rates in nine slum ghetto areas … averaged 33 percent. These were the pressures operating on the mid-twentieth-century lower-class black family. Not surprisingly, the rate of family breakup (measured by male presence) increased between 1950 and 1970. But that ‘rate’ had little if any connection to ‘a tangle of pathology’ rooted in ‘deep-seated structural distortions in the life of Negro Americans,’ The behavior of poor southern black migrants to Central Harlem, among others, in 1925 makes that clear.” (Pg. 468)

This book will be of keen interest to those studying the African-American family and its history, and sociology.