DIVERSITY | Offering a place for everyone
29 December 2008
Family Bonds
Tight family bonds offer slaves a source of strength
This article is excerpted from the book Free At Last: The U.S. Civil Rights Movement, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. View the entire book (PDF, 3.6 MB).
The slaves’ tight family bonds would prove a similar source of strength. Slave masters could, and often did, split up families — literally selling members to other slave owners, splitting husband from wife, parents from children. But many slave families remained intact, and many scholars have noted the “remarkable stability, strength, and durability of the nuclear family under slavery.” Slaves were typically housed as extended family units. Slave children, historian C. Vann Woodward writes, at least “were assured a childhood, one exempt from labor and degradation past the age when working-class children of England and France were condemned to mine and factory.”
The African-American family structure adapted to meet the challenges posed by slavery, and later by discrimination and economic inequality. Many black family units resembled extended clans rather than smaller, immediate families. Some were organized with strong females as central authority figures. Slaveholders sometimes encouraged these family ties, reasoning that the threat of breaking up a family helped undermine the threats of disobedience and rebellion.
Regardless, strong immediate and extended families helped ensure African-American survival. In the Caribbean colonies and in Brazil, slave mortality rates exceeded birth rates, but blacks in the United States reproduced at the same rate as the white population. By the 1770s, only one in five slaves in British North America had been born in Africa. Even after 1808, when the United States banned the importation of slaves, their numbers increased from 1.2 million to nearly 4 million on the eve of the Civil War in 1861.
Slavery brought Africans to America and deprived them of the freedoms enjoyed by Americans of European origin. But even in bondage, many African Americans developed strong family ties and faith-based institutions and laid a foundation upon which future generations could build a triumphant civil rights movement. The struggle for freedom and equality began long before Rosa Parks claimed a seat on the front of the bus, more than a century before Martin Luther King Jr. inspired Americans with his famous dream.
