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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - X. The Negro Community - 43. Institutions - 2. The Negro Family
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Chapter 43. Institutions 933
less divorce than upper class whites.® They have reacted against the reputa-
tion of lower class Negroes and have not permitted themselves the marital
laxness of some upper class whites. This has been more or less a spontaneous
trend, developing not so much with a positive model from white society,^
but more with the negative stimulus of white derisiveness. Whites do not
realize that one of the most stable types of urban families is that of the
Negro upper class, so in one sense the effort to build a reputation is wasted.
But ammunition for white derision is lessened and a model for the Negro
lower class is provided. Thus the efforts of the small Negro upper class
may yet have an important effect.
There are no perfect indices of family disorganization, since there are
no official statistics on extra-marital relations, on ^^temporary” marriages
without benefit of clergy, or on unofficial desertion. Perhaps the best direct
index of family stability that is available is that of illegitimacy. There is
far from complete reporting of illegitimate births, there is even serious
under-reporting of all types of births. But the figures are available for the
whole country and are relatively more complete than for any other direct
index of family disorganization. Table i brings out strikingly the differ-
ence between Negro and white illegitimacy.^ For the United States as a
whole, the figures indicate that Negroes have about eight times as much
illegitimacy as native whites and about sixteen times as much illegitimacy
as the foreign-born whites. Differentials between various groups of
Negroes are not so certain, but there would seem to be fewer cases of
illegitimacy in the North than in the South (despite lack of regional differ-
ences among whites) and fewer in the rural areas than in the urban areas.
There are no nation-wide statistics on, divorce by race, and even the
scattered statistics available are of limited significance because most Negro
couples who separate do so without a divorce and because the states have
different legal practices in divorce. The same is true of legal desertion
statistics.’^ All census data on this problem are somewhat inaccurate, and the
figures cited suggest conditions rather than measure them precisely. The
census information on the marital status of Negroes is especially inaccurate,
since unmarried couples are inclined to report themselves as married, and
women who have never married but who have children are inclined to
* The model for the upper class Negro family was, in a sense, the white upper class family
of an earlier generation. In this case, as in so many other cases, Negroes were assimilated
with a cultural lag.
^
“Other races” are predominantly Negro and so may be used as an index of Negro.
Frazier has data on illegitimacy for selected cities which have better statistics than the
rest of the nation and which separate Negroes from whites. These data show roughly the
same things as the table presented here. (See E. Franklin Frazier, T/ie Negro Family in the
United States [1959], Appendix B, pp, 568-569.) For a summary of studies of Negro
illegitimacy in special localities, see Eleanor C. Isbell, “Memorandum on the Negro Family
in America,” unpublished manuscript prepared for this study (1940), pp. 63-64 and 84-89.
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