The contemporary status of black families is inseparable from the history of slavery, segregation, and desegregation. Buffeted by white racism over time, they remained markedly uneducated or undereducated and poor. Though the Civil Rights Movement, War on Poverty (WOP), and post–civil rights social programs helped to improve their life chances, persistent racial discrimination especially hurt them.

Enslaved and free blacks laid black familial foundations. When the master agreed, slaves could cohabit or marry. Many masters had bond mistresses, promoted slave breeding, and broke up slaves’ families for sale. Yet, by adopting African customs, such as naming children after days of the week or for kin, the enslaved preserved the memory of those lost at auction or in death. For mutual support, they created an extended family: a father, mother, and children; grandparents, aunts, uncles; free kinfolk; and frequently children of deceased or sold friends. Children on large plantations lived with both parents; on smaller ones, mostly with mothers. The free black minority often had two-parent families. Blacks increasingly converted to Christianity, a source of freedom and togetherness. They urged missionaries to implore Christian masters to keep their families together. Black churches, in the meantime, fostered monogamous marriage, marital fidelity, and solidarity among blacks in the South and the nation.

Families survived. Freedmen and women legitimated slave marriages and children, sustained two-parent households, and took in displaced relatives, while they and their posterity faced sharecropping, Jim Crow, and penury. They undertook rural-to-urban migrations for better livelihoods. Circa 1880–1925 “the typical Afro-American family was lower class in status and headed by two parents” (Gutman, 1976, p. 456). High black male mortality, however, produced a larger percentage of female-headed households for blacks than whites before and during the Great Depression. Still, in 1940 three-fourths of black families with a child younger than eighteen included the husband and wife, a trend to 1960.

Racial and economic reforms in the 1960s underlaid blacks’ mobility into the middle class and safety net for all. The WOP initiated Medicare and Medicaid. It also revitalized Aid to Families with Dependent Children and launched the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (1973), which established the Job Corps, altogether funding food stamps, job training, and jobs for the disadvantaged, and the Head Start Program for early childhood education.