Henry,
Thank you for your insightful response. I also have a question about the post 1865 records, and whether they were considered. I was raised in a community where the majority of families were intact.  I believe there are a combination of factors affecting the black family today. I can look back at least two generations and see stable black families. I was raised in a Mill Town in Pennsylvania,  and most of the men worked in the mill. There were also black Doctors, Dentists, and even a black hospital. Many of the businesses that we frequented were small black businesses.  We also shopped at the larger stores in the area, when necessary. Most of the Middle Class blacks sent their children to Negro Colleges in the South, or their sons went to the Military. I remember when my two oldest brothers left to go to the Military.  At that time it was a place to serve your country, and get an education.  My second oldest brother graduated from the University of London, and the University of Wisconsin, during his stint in the Air Force. 

Things did change during the 60's not only for African Americans, but the society at large. 

Anita 



> Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2008 21:36:35 -0400
> From: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Slave culture re: marriages, Virginia
> To: [log in to unmask]
> 
> I've always had a problem with Brenda Stevenson's book. I think her
> research was fundamentally flawed, which led her to questionable
> conclusions about the nature of the African-American family in
> slavery. She argues for the prevalence of a female-focused family,
> with fathers largely absent. She used George Washington's records as
> one template for her argument. I think she read Washington's records
> correctly, but in a limited way. Washington systematically separated
> husbands and wives on his five farms because he needed the skilled
> males at his home farm, Mount Vernon, and he relegated the women and
> children on his four outlying farms. Much of the menial field labor on
> the outlying farms was done by women and children. However, much of
> what went on in the enslaved community was invisible to the
> masters/mistresses or beneath their concern.  So Washington's records
> cannot and do not show how strong the nuclear family connections among
> the slaves might have been. So Stevenson builds an argument based on
> half a picture. Then there is Stevenson's flawed reading of Loudoun
> County records from the 1840s and 1850s. When you look at these
> documents you'll find the owners recording the names of female slaves
> and the children born to them, which gives the impression that there
> were few marriages, few stable mother-father-children families. My
> problem with her research is that she never looked at any post-1865
> documents, such as Freedman's Bureau records, deeds, marriage records,
> Cohabitation Registers, death records, and other court records, where
> you can readily find lots of evidence of long-term, stable marriages
> and nuclear families that had existed invisibly in slavery time for
> decades. You need to look at the post-1865 records to find evidence of
> these family structures, because the owners had little or no interest
> in recording them. I think Stevenson was trying to build an argument
> that modern weaknesses in the African-American family have their roots
> in slavery. I don't reject that argument but I don't quite buy it
> either. It's one of the big questions of American history. Stevenson
> gave an interview to NPR in which she expressed this argument more
> forcefully than she does in her book. Somewhere in my files I have a
> column William Raspberry wrote in the Washington Post in the mid-1990s
> in which he cited research showing that in the early 1950s
> African-American nuclear family rates were higher than among white
> people, and that the nuclear-family rates began to fall after 1960,
> leading to the situation we have now. Raspberry's argument was that
> the problems in the African-American family are modern, not rooted in
> slavery or segregation. I have a feeling he's right, but I have not
> researched this; and it's a question that deserves a hard, objective
> look.  Herbert Gutman's research on the African-American family, which
> shows strong family structures, is some of the best work we have, but
> his research is 40 years old. We have a lot more raw material to dig
> into now.
> 
> Henry Wiencek
> Charlottesville
> 
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