Drugs Cited as Cause of Crisis : Pleas Made for Adoptive Homes for Black Children

Nobody seemed to want her. Not even her mother, a cocaine addict who gave birth to the baby girl at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center and then left her there, struggling for life in the neonatal ward alongside a dozen other drug babies.

Dr. Xylina Bean, a pediatrics professor at the hospital, said she tried for weeks to find an “ideal” family that would consider taking in the infant, who spent her first days of life quivering from drug withdrawal. But after five months of caring for the baby, who never seemed to stop crying, Bean was losing hope. “I figured I was the next best thing.”

So Bean, a single black woman, decided to adopt her.

Seven months after she brought her home, she said the little girl is doing fine. “Nothing’s wrong with my baby,” said Bean, smiling and adding, “Every child deserves a home.”

For years, there have been more black children in need of adoptive homes than there were homes to take them. But, according to child welfare authorities, the problem has grown in recent years into a nationwide crisis as a steadily increasing percentage of black children risk spending childhood in foster care.

In Los Angeles County, where blacks make up 12% of the population, more than half of the children recently waiting to be adopted were black. And the drug epidemic is making a bad problem worse.

One reason that there are not enough black families to adopt, officials say, is that many in the black community do not realize the size of the problem, and those who do are frequently dissuaded by a tangled bureaucracy. So in what has become a nationwide effort, government agencies have joined with black churches and other community institutions to wage an intense campaign to recruit black adoptive parents.

County and state agencies are using radio announcements and bus ads, celebrity spokespersons and campaign slogans, brochures and billboards to find black families.

The need is so great that Los Angeles County has created a special unit that does nothing but recruit and ease the adoption process for prospective black parents.

A private agency in the San Francisco Bay Area has shown pictures of adoptable black children between innings of a baseball game, and social workers at a South Los Angeles-based agency will travel as far as Palm Springs and the border at San Diego to find families.

The crisis has also spawned renewed debate over whether black children should have to wait for black homes when there might be others willing to adopt them.

‘Outstripping Capacity’

“The number of black kids is just outstripping the current capacity of the black community to absorb them,” said Jim Brown, chief of adoptions for the California Department of Social Services, which initiated a two-year promotional campaign to recruit minority foster and adoptive parents last November. “They may have to adopt at 10 times their current rate; we don’t know how high it’ll have to go.”

Whether it is being preached from the pulpit of a Baptist church, read on a billboard overlooking Crenshaw Boulevard or announced on a black radio station, the message, to quote the state slogan, is the same: “Bring our children home.”

Although the numbers of children waiting for adoptive homes nationwide is dropping, the proportion of minority children--particularly blacks--in need of placement is climbing. Black children, who made up about 25% of children waiting to be adopted in the late ‘70s, now constitute 40% of that population, according to federal officials.

In California, where the numbers of black children needing homes has steadily risen since at least 1985, only 18% of the children adopted between July, 1987, and June, 1988, were black, although they comprised more than 30% of all children waiting.

‘Reason Is Drugs’

“And the reason is drugs,” said Carlos Sosa, assistant director of the county Department of Children’s Services.

Socioeconomic problems such as unemployment and poverty have always disproportionately affected minorities, making their children more susceptible to entering the child welfare system. But drugs, particularly cocaine, have become one of the most devastating factors in a cycle that sends children into foster care and keeps them there indefinitely.

“It is a phenomenon that disintegrates the family much quicker than anything we’ve seen in the past,” said Sosa, who added that in the last three years the number of drug babies being referred to the county has jumped from between 30 and 40 a month to about 200--most of them black.

Drugs are particularly devastating for blacks, according to adoption officials, because they contribute to the destruction of the extended family network which has traditionally absorbed needy children.

“The black extended family has always been there for us . . . but the drug culture causes holes in the safety net,” said Zena F. Oglesby Jr., executive director of the Institute for Black Parenting, the first private, full service black adoption and foster care agency in Southern California. “That girl on drugs, her family would probably absorb her child, but that drug culture tears the fabric of the family. They might not even know where she is.”

Adoption Percentage Higher

Despite a perceived weakening of the black extended family, statistics suggest that blacks adopt in higher proportions than others. A nationwide survey conducted for the federal government in the early 1980s found that black families adopted children from public welfare agencies at 4 1/2 times the rate of whites and Latinos. However, the study added that the black community would have to more than double its effort to provide homes to all black children waiting to be adopted.

It is not an impossible goal, said Oglesby, who added that many black families are interested in adoption but have been discouraged by the expense of private agencies and the jumble of public agencies that sometimes keep them waiting as long as five years for a child.

To bring them forward, the state Department of Social Services has joined with county and private agencies in a minority home recruitment effort which includes a speaker’s bureau, an adoption exchange program and a media campaign.

Officials say that $653,000 has been set aside in the state budget for minority home recruitment, funding that initially began in 1982 after a push by social service officials and Assemblywoman Gwen Moore (D-Los Angeles). Besides bus ads, billboards, and singer Marilyn McCoo and actor Rene Enriquez acting as spokespersons, the state instituted a toll-free hot line that in its first four months received nearly 2,000 calls.

Like Campaign Elsewhere

A similar campaign is being waged in New Jersey, where black children make up 80% of those up for adoption. California took the effort a step further by providing funding for the creation of one Latino and two black adoption agencies, which in turn work with government agencies in finding families.

The Black Adoption Placement and Research Center in Oakland opened last August, and the Institute for Black Parenting in Los Angeles opened two months later. It has placed 10 children and is working with more than 80 families.

The reason that an adoption agency--run by blacks and based in the black community--is needed is apparent as soon as one walks up to the Institute for Black Parenting on Western Avenue. “No fees for service,” reads the sign in the window, a marked difference from many private agencies which often charge thousands of dollars. “Convenient personalized services” and “culturally sensitive social workers,” the agency promises.

“Black families tend to trust organizations within their own communities. We trust the NAACP, the Urban League (and) our churches,” explained Oglesby, who said that his staff will go to churches and military bases to find prospective black parents and then will process them quickly.

Oglesby and others acknowledge that minorities are not the only ones who can work with minorities, but some prospective minority parents prefer it.

Felt Like Interrogation

The Russells, a professional young black couple in the Moreno Valley who recently adopted an 8-year-old boy and a 2-year-old girl, said they felt as though they were being interrogated rather than interviewed by a white county social worker who helped place their youngest child.

The couple said the social worker seemed more interested in how they were able to afford their lavish home than the fact that they wanted to share it with a homeless child. To Janet Russell, 34, “It boils down to a black-white situation. They see black families who want kids, but unless you conform to their ideas and their criteria, they won’t let them have a child.”

Said her husband, Kyle, who spent 11 years in foster care and now has a real estate business: “They’re (social workers) basically looking for the Huxtable or the Donna Reed family. And you’re not going to find that. That’s not reality.”

Neither is it realistic to believe that a black home can be found for every black child, according to a number of people who believe in the merits of trans-racial adoption.

“I don’t believe in our lifetime we will see every homeless black child find a black family. For many black children, just having a family is not a possibility,” said Donna Salisbury, who belongs to the Open Door Society of Los Angeles which provides support for children and families involved in trans-racial adoption. “Trans-racial adoption beats the heck out of foster care for life.”

State Law Cited

State law requires case workers to try for at least six months to match a child with a family of the same ethnicity. But this guideline can be lengthened at a county’s discretion, and some believe such regulations should either be done away with or be more strictly adhered to, so that children do not grow old in foster care waiting for a black family that might never come along.

Samantha Davidge, a 24-year-old black woman adopted by a white couple when she was 1 year old, said that such a rule only hurts the child. “Look at the needs of the child and then look at who’s available,” she said. “Six months is a long time in a kid’s life.”

But heads of black adoption agencies say that such options should not even be considered until government agencies make a thorough effort to recruit families within the black community. And there is no better place to begin, they say, than the black church.

State, county and black adoption agency officials all have made a point to speak to black congregations. And black churches have initiated their own programs to recruit adoptive parents, such as the One Church, One Child program that began in Chicago and has now spread across the country, and the Room For One More referral program that began in 1978 at the Ward African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles.

“Care About Black Children’

“I do this because I care about black children,” said Billie Green, who heads the Ward AME program, which hosts gatherings where prospective parents can meet children who are up for adoption. “Without black children, there is no future for black people . . . I want to see some more Jesse Jacksons.” And she said they’re not going to develop in the foster care system. “Find them a good mommy and daddy, and that’s where they’ll come from.”

One recent morning, the Institute for Black Parenting held an Adoption Sunday at West Angeles Church of God in Christ on Crenshaw Boulevard, and actor Taurean Blacque stood before the congregation of more than 2,000 to share his experience as an adoptive parent.

“We as Christians are taught to save souls,” Blacque told the mostly black gathering. “How about saving children?” And the congregation said “Amen.”

Blacque, a spokesman for the institute, has heeded his own words. He has raised two of his own children, adopted four others and is in the process of adopting five more.

The reason, he said, is responsibility. “They are our children,” said Blacque, who then quoted from Proverbs: “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”