Afterword

An afterword brings the issues up to 2018, discussing how the various issues continue in new ways in the 21st century, with issues of gay marriage and immigration continuing many of the debates of the 20th century.

“Hurtin’ Words,” “Free Bird,” and Family Values

This chapter discusses multiple perspectives on whether white southerners faced new family crises in the 1970s. Legislators passed divorce reform laws in the early 1970s that made divorce far easier and less public. The music of the early 1970s Southern Rock Movement, Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Allman Brothers, and others, upheld a “Free Bird” ideal of endless rambling with no family responsibilities. Church groups responded by debating whether divorced church members should remarry and, more broadly, by including divorce reform in their list of moral failures to be addressed by the Religious Right.

The Only American Community Where Men Call Each Other “Brother” When They Meet: Redefining Brotherhood and Sisterhood in the 1960s

This chapter describes activists who rejected the idea of a crisis in African American family life. In response to the Moynihan Report of 1965, many African Americans rejected claims about the weakness of family life, offering the strength and creativity embodied in adaptable family definitions. At the same time, many African Americans began using the terms “brother” and “sister” not as arguments about racial integration but to refer to the shared experiences of African American men and women.

Not a Problem People

This chapter studies several movements in the late 1970s and 1980s that rejected the idea that southern families were facing unique crises. Alex Haley’s popular Roots, several African American memoirists, and the Black Family Reunion all celebrated adaptable, creative families. Habitat for Humanity hoped to improve life for people in poverty without assuming those people’s problems had roots in troubled families. Southern feminist novelists detailed a multiplicity of family styles.

Yours for the Cause of Peace and Brotherhood, 1930s–1960s

This chapter takes seriously the concept of Christian brotherhood, which emerged in the early civil rights years as a family language with the potential to undermine hierarchies involving racial difference. Brotherhood (and sometimes sisterhood) became a crucial idea for reformers hoping to get deeper inside human relationships than legal solutions to problems of discrimination seemed to promise. The chapter presents short intellectual studies of individual reformers who used the concept of brotherhood.

The White Man’s Holy Institution of Matrimony

This chapter details the ways opponents of the civil rights movement opposed the notion of brotherhood, referring to “brotherhoodism” as a concept that could undermine all authority, the significance of race, and, ultimately, any standards of right and wrong. The chapter argues that leaders of massive resistance against the civil rights movement claimed their movement was about family protection, and they said that instead of brotherhood, they supported the power of parents.

Family Crises or Home Remedies

This chapter compares discussions of family problems among African Americans and whites in the American South in the early 1900s. Both African American and white southerners discussed an ongoing crisis among African Americans, with considerable disagreement about whether they should explain that crisis, fix the problems that caused it, or pass laws to protect white people against the consequences. By contrast, white southerners imagined that most whites had stable family lives, especially when they lived on farms, and perhaps needed occasional reform movements to address specific problems.

Introduction

WHAT MIGHT WE LEARN from a book on how people in the twentieth-century American South defined the problems of family life? Just a few moments from the summer of 2016 suggest some possibilities. Mississippi House Bill 1523, called the Religious Liberty Accommodations Act, claimed to protect people who believed that marriage should only unite one man and one woman from any laws or codes that might force them to marry or serve same-sex couples. When a U.S. district judge ruled that the law was unconstitutional, he compared it to Jim Crow laws that claimed to protect white people from laws that might force them into unwanted contact with African Americans. In the same summer, one of the first testimonials about Alton Sterling, the victim of a police killing in Baton Rouge, came from a friend who called him “just a brother” who was working to support his family. One of many responses to police violence that summer came from former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who claimed that there would be less violence, crime, and unrest if more black fathers would teach their children how to behave. The Democratic National Convention welcomed a group of women, called Mothers of the Movement, whose children had been killed by police officers. An internet story that turned out to be a hoax claimed that Hillary Clinton’s book ...