‘Crisis in Black America’

It is clear that Will knows little about the history of the black family in the United States. In the beginning of slavery, families, clans and tribes were torn asunder to prevent intergroup communications. Later, parents and siblings were routinely split up and scattered for the monetary gain of slaveholders. Furthermore, so savage was the American South that many plantations there served as breeding farms where promiscuity was not simply tolerated or encouraged, but also forced on slaves to increase profits.

Following the abolition of slavery there was no Marshall Plan to rebuild the black family. No! Not even the promised “40 acres and a mule.” Black families were left to fend for themselves; and their attempts to establish businesses, educate their children and acquire property were thwarted at every turn by lynchings, Jim Crow laws and pervasive racism.

Today the black family of the urban north is the remnant of 200 years of broad-gauged, brutal and uncurbed assaults. Its dependency, promiscuity, crisis of spirit and loss of vision are the consequences of its desperate struggle to survive on the outskirts of American democracy.

Even now, the black family is subject to constant attack. On radio, “black music” radiates messages of freakiness, hustling, promiscuity and social disorder to black children all across America. With few exceptions, movie theaters, playhouses and television portray black men and women as fools, clowns and criminals who have few stable relationships and virtually no families. Further, television’s most prominent black children are depicted as abandoned dwarfs who have been rescued by benevolent white families.

American whites will probably never change the insidious forms of institutional racism that persist in this country and, more than any other force, contribute to the destruction of the black family. Nevertheless, black people are resilient. We have long known of and grappled with the problems that Will has just discovered. And we shall survive this crisis with the same strength, will and dignity that brought our forebears through the terror and trauma of earlier life in North America.

LEGRAND H. CLEGG II

Compton