AS ISABEL WILKERSON DETAILS so elegantly and eloquently in The Warmth of Other Suns, Jim Crow laws in the South gave rise to the Great Migration:
Over the course of six decades, some six million black southerners left the land of their forefathers and fanned out across the country for an uncertain existence in nearly every other corner of America. . . . A good portion of all black Americans alive picked up and left the tobacco farms of Virginia, the rice plantations of South Carolina, cotton fields in east Texas and Mississippi, and the villages and backwoods of the remaining southern states. . . . [The Great Migration] would force the South to search its soul and finally to lay aside a feudal caste system. It grew out of the unmet promises made after the Civil War and, through the sheer weight of it, helped push the country toward the civil rights revolutions of the 1960s.
(2010, P. 9)
However, even after the Jim Crow laws were dismantled following the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), many blacks remained frustrated by the slow pace of change toward racial equality and social justice. Then, fifteen months after the Brown decision was handed down, tragedy riveted black America in August 1955. Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was visiting relatives in Mississippi when he supposedly flirted with a twenty-one-year-old white woman. When the woman’s husband found out, he, a relative, and another man set out to find the young boy. The men kidnapped Emmett Till, brutalized him, and then murdered him, shocking the nation (Chandler, 2012).
Several months later Rosa Parks, a seamstress and secretary of the Montgomery, Alabama, chapter of the NAACP, was arrested after refusing to give up her seat on a city bus to a white man. Parks’s arrest in December 1955 triggered a boycott of Montgomery buses by blacks, who comprised almost 70 percent of the system’s ridership. The boycott, organized by a local minister, Martin Luther King Jr., and his colleague Ralph Abernathy, continued for 381 days, significantly reducing the revenue of the city’s bus company. Ninety-nine percent of the city’s black residents rode in carpools, took taxis, or walked. The boycott, the first major salvo of the modern civil rights movement, ended more than a year later, on the effective date of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that segregated busing is unconstitutional (Independence Hall, 2008–14; Ingram, 1956).
Subsequent efforts to force Americans to finally reckon with the racial, political, and socioeconomic injustices inflicted on African Americans for far too long included the dispatch of federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to escort nine African American students to high school in 1957; lunch counter sit-ins (1960); the Freedom Rides (1961); the enrollment at the University of Mississippi of James Meredith, the first African American student to matriculate there (1962); and the spring 1963 attack on nonviolent protesters, including children, by police wielding fire hoses, night sticks, and police dogs in Birmingham, Alabama (Leadership Conference, 2001).
On August 28, 1963, came the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom organized by six major civil rights organizations. It brought to the capital 250,000 men, women, and children of all races and ages in a peaceful demonstration. The march, which is credited with helping to secure passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, culminated in a rally at the Lincoln Memorial, where Martin Luther King gave his famous “I have a dream” speech:
In a sense we have come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check; a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.” But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check—a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice. We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of Democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to open the doors of opportunity to all of God’s children. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.
(KING, 1992, PP. 616–17)
Indeed as King underscored on that August day, the values of social justice, equality, respect for one another, and integration must be extended to all citizens, regardless of their skin color and background.
The changes brought about by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were immediate and dramatic, especially in the South:
The share of black employees at South Carolina textile companies jumped from less than 5 percent in 1963 to more than 20 percent in 1970 and to more than a third by 1980. Similar patterns were observed in all the Southern textile states. According to oral histories, blacks in textile areas referred to integration as “The Change,” and associated it with the reversal of black regional migration in the 1960s and ’70s.
Although the industry later declined in response to global competition, desegregation of textiles was the single-largest contributor to the sharp increase in relative black incomes from 1965 to 1975, an exclusively Southern regional phenomenon. . . . Not only did black living standards improve, but mill workers with limited schooling were often able to send their children to college, taking advantage of expanding educational and employment opportunities elsewhere in the region.
(WRIGHT, 2013)
One consequence of integration was formal regulation of the placement of black children for adoption (Reid-Merritt, 2010). Previously the black community had been shut out of the formal system and simply saw to it that parentless black children were informally fostered and adopted by their extended families and communities, a practice that sustained the youngsters through their childhoods and adolescent years and nurtured them as adults. Black social workers became concerned that a child welfare system designed to meet the needs of white children was not equipped culturally to meet the needs of black children from inner-city neighborhoods. An increasing number of white couples became interested in adopting black children as the number of available white infants decreased, a result of the availability of the birth-control pill (1960) and other improved means of contraception, and the legalization of abortion in 1972 (Reid-Merritt, 2010). From the mid-1960s to the early 1970s approximately fifteen thousand black children were adopted by white parents (Davis, 1991). In many cases these were white parents like mine, who had embraced the philosophy of the civil rights movement and wanted to grow their family through adoption; they eagerly agreed to raise black and biracial children as their own.
One of the few times the transracial adoptive community collectively heard from the black community was in 1972, when the National Association of Black Social Workers (NABSW) went on record to voice its strong opposition to transracial adoption, particularly the adoption of black and biracial children by white parents. The NABSW was alarmed by the increasing number of black children who had been removed from their communities and were waiting to be adopted. The NABSW was especially concerned about the blatant forms of racism that existed in American society and in the U.S. child care system and questioned the ability of white parents to rear racially and culturally secure black children (Reid-Merritt, 2010).
After the NABSW’s statement in 1972, the number of black and biracial children adopted domestically by white parents dropped off significantly (Reid-Merritt, 2010; Herman, 2012). International adoptions by white Americans surged throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s (Herman, 2012). Although the NABSW still stands firm on its 1972 position, the organization’s voice has softened, acceding to transracial adoptive policies that grant whites easy access to black children in the foster care system (Reid-Merritt, 2010). Thus with minimal connection to the black community and no robust guidance from adoption agencies, white transracial adoptive parents were left to raise black children with insufficient knowledge of basic hair and skin care needs and with a dismal education about, and appreciation of, their child’s ethnic community of origin and the varied experiences of that community or communities. When adoptees of color ventured out on their own, they were ill equipped to navigate the racial and emotional land mines lying just below the surface of American society.
MEMBERS OF THE BLACK community whom I interviewed for this section come out of the civil rights era. All extend themselves to provide readers with suggestions about how to connect with the black community. Through their experiences, expertise, hard times, perseverance, and self-reflection they offer basic tools that can strengthen families, especially transracial adoptive families, and provide information that will allow adoptees of color to move in society with added confidence, purpose, knowledge, and self-love.
Back in 1903 W. E. B. Du Bois argued in The Souls of Black Folk that the key issue troubling twentieth-century America was the problem of race. He fought relentlessly against Jim Crow laws and discrimination in education and employment. I was honored to have the opportunity to speak to Arthur E. McFarlane II, Du Bois’s great grandson. I wondered whether Du Bois and all that he stood for had left a generational imprint on his descendants. What also makes McFarlane special is his comfort level with transracial adoptive families. He has made it a point to live a racially integrated life, including developing relationships with white parents who are raising children of color. (I first met him in 2000 at a culture camp in Colorado for white parents raising black children.) Transracial adoptive families are likely to find his words of support heartening.
Lora Kay’s personal and professional lives are inspiring. Her words remind me of when, as a little girl, I felt that I was not good enough, pretty enough, or even smart enough to compete in this world. Today Kay (Lora Kay is a pseudonym) speaks to black girls who are bombarded by negative images of themselves, especially in the media, and gives them hope. Her work, educating at-risk youth in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, underscores her unwavering commitment to investing in the next generation of young people. Having this conversation with Kay was fascinating, as she is a mentor to my white nonadopted brother, Chris. I was interested in knowing how that relationship developed across racial and cultural lines.
Chester Jackson, like the other interviewees in this section, is a child of the 1950s. He grew up in New York City and speaks from an insider’s perspective as he is an adoptive father himself and works as an adoption professional who places older children from the foster care system. He speaks honestly and compassionately to prospective adoptive parents about what it means to adopt and how to prepare themselves to take on this beautiful and complex commitment.
Henry Allen grew up in the Chicago area in the throes of the civil rights era. As a child he was fascinated by both Albert Einstein, whose brilliant thinking Allen credits with “changing the physical world,” and Martin Luther King Jr., who Allen believes embodied the ability to think critically about ways to stimulate holistic social change. As a young person estranged from his own family, Allen lived with a white missionary family in Illinois for several years, an experience that gives him insight into the experience of black children adopted into white families. Further, both as a professor who has taught transracial adoptees in his classrooms and as someone who (with his wife) has interacted with transracial adoptive families in his community, Henry Allen is quite vocal about what he has perceived. I specifically sought to interview Allen because of his life experiences and his professional expertise in issues of race and culture. Here he discusses the influences of race and culture on human interactions and why it is essential for transracial adoptive families to examine their own behaviors and understand these constructs within their family units.