The First African American Family: Then and Now

The African American Family Now

For instance, the November 5, 2008 issue of the New York Times notes, “As the first African Americans in the role, they will be a living tableau of racial progress, and friends say they are acutely aware that everything they say and do—the way they dress, where Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7, go to school, even what kind of puppy they adopt—will brim with symbolic value.

“‘Here’s an intact black family, a happy family, with beautiful kids and a loving extended family,’” Ms. Williams (a family friend) said, “’and they happen to live in the executive mansion.’”[1]

The African American Family Then: Pulling the Rope in Unison

Unfortunately, it has become something of a cliché to imagine that Black families today find it difficult to experience stability because of a long history of instability caused by slavery and racism. While not at all minimizing the obstacles that enslaved African American families have faced, history paints a truer and more optimistic picture of their response. Though everything fought against them, enslaved African Americans battled gallantly to maintain family cohesion—a cohesion that provided a sturdy platform from which to handle life courageously.

In my book, Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction,[2] I offer many examples of such family cohesion. For example, Jennie Hill was born and enslaved in 1837 in Missouri. Florence Patton interviewed the ninety-six-year-old Hill in 1933. During her interview, Hill adamantly resisted the notion that enslaved families lacked closeness. “Some people think that the slaves had no feeling—that they bore their children as animals bear their young and that there was no heartbreak when the children were torn from their parents or the mother taken from her brood to toil for a master in another state. But that isn’t so. The slaves loved their families even as the Negroes love their own today. . .”[3]

Communicating the message of African American family love was so important to Reverend Thomas Jones that he bore witness to it on the very first page of his narrative. “I can testify, from my own painful experience, to the deep and fond affection which the slave cherishes in his heart for his home and its dear ones. We have no other tie to link us to the human family, but our fervent love for those who are with us and of us in relations of sympathy and devotedness, in wrongs and wretchedness.”[4]

Satan longs to blind African Americans to their legacy of family love. He wants all of us to believe that hardships make it too hard to love. Hill’s family, Jones’ family, and millions like them, belie that lie.

Enslaved African American couples sustained strong marital relationships. Venture Smith was born in Dukandarra, in Guinea, about 1729. Kidnapped at age eight, Robertson Mumford purchased him a year later. After living with Mumford for thirteen years, Venture married Meg at age twenty-two. They remained together for over forty-seven years, through many trials and tribulations, until parted by death.

Venture’s narrative contains an explanation for their marital faithfulness. On the occasion of their marriage, Venture threw a rope over his cabin and asked his wife to go to the opposite side and pull on the rope hanging there while he remained and pulled on his end. After they both had tugged at it awhile in vain, he called her to his side of the cabin and by their united effort they drew the rope to themselves with ease. He then explained the object lesson to his young bride. “If we pull in life against each other we shall fail, but if we pull together we shall succeed.”[5]

Premarital couples, newlyweds, and seasoned married spouses would all do well to heed Venture’s guiding wisdom. And all families will be watching to learn what guiding wisdom they can glean from the example of the Obama family—the First Family.