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J DFM 2.2 (2012): 34-40 The Challenge of Matriarchy: Family Discipleship and the African-American Experience KEVIN L. SMITH Kevin L. Smith (Ph.D. cand., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is Assistant Professor of Church History at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and pastor of Watson Memorial Baptist Church. Before being appointed to the faculty of Southern Seminary, Kevin served as the Martin Luther King Jr. Fellow at Southern Seminary. He has been a church planter in Tennessee and a pastor in Tennessee and Kentucky. He is a frequent conference speaker and has served in short-term missions in the Caribbean and Africa. Kevin is also a member of the Organization of American Historians and of the American Society of Church History. He is married to the former Patricia Moore; three children and two greatnephews complete their family of seven. Did God give fathers a special and specific command to be responsible for the godly training of their children? That’s precisely what Paul declared in his letter to the Ephesian church: “Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (6:4). But where has the black church stood on this issue? And in what ways do the dynamics of the black church differ from the challenges faced by Christian brothers and sisters with different cultural backgrounds? These are the questions that form a vital background as we consider the interaction between churches and African-American fathers, mothers, and children in the Christian formation of present and future generations. The black church has functioned as a central organizing institution in the African-American experience. 1 As such, the history of the black church coincides with the general flow of the lives of former Africans in North America: slavery, Reconstruction, segregation, the Civil Rights Movement, and the post-Civil Rights era. 2 Each of these periods influenced the African-American family in ways that often undercut the influence of fathers and established de facto matriarchal structures. Necessary and well-intended family leadership from mothers, grandmothers, and aunts unintentionally created a legacy of “fatherlessness” in the African-American family and—by extension—in the black church. THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN FAMILY FROM SLAVERY TO CIVIL RIGHTS Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has referred to slavery as America’s national “birth defect.” 3 Her graphic description provides a beginning point for examining the long-term effects of the early Africans’ plight in North America and how their plight influenced the trajectory of African-American families. The slave was primarily an object in the system of chattel slavery; therefore, all other aspects of the slave’s life, including family structures, were secondary. In most cases, it would have been impossible for slaves to have practically or functionally prioritized family roles, particularly fatherhood. 34
African-American Family Structures Prior to the American Civil War Slaveholders held little or no regard for family relationships among their slaves. Even before reaching America, many slaves had been terribly destabilized and “broken” in order to be resocialized into the slavery system. The human cargo which [the slave traders] collected were the remnants of various tribes and clan organizations. The manner in which men and women were packed indiscriminately in slave ships during the Middle Passage tended to destroy social bonds and tribal distinctions. The process of “breaking” the Negroes into the slaves system in the West Indies, where they often landed before shipment to the colonies and the United States, tended to efface the memories of their traditional culture. In the colonies and later in the southern United States, the slaves were widely scattered on comparatively small plantations where there was little opportunity to reknit social bonds or regenerate the African culture. 4 Until the early nineteenth century, male slaves outnumbered female slaves. In many cases, male slaves had sexual encounters with Native American women; these encounters resulted in children without functioning fathers, outcasts from the communities both of their fathers and of their mothers. Female slaves were subjected to their masters’ sexual whims. In some cases, their biracial children received a measure of status from their slaveholding fathers; in other cases, the children remained unrecognized and unwanted, except as living property. In an economy where property was currency, masters often sold or traded slaves. In what certainly laid the foundation for matriarchal family structures, motherchild relationships were protected in many of these transactions while husband-wife relationships held no dependable status. On some economically-stable plantations, it was possible for slaves to develop family structures that mirrored the family of the plantation patriarch. Such situations seem to have been rare, however. Some manumitted slaves did develop reasonably stable family structures. The families of these “freed blacks” manifested a peculiar form of patriarchy that differed from the typical patterns that characterized the century leading up to the American Civil War. African-American Family Structures during Reconstruction and Segregation After the American Civil War, one might have expected the newly-freed slaves and families to have flourished. In reality, there were still many challenges to be faced. If the slavery era of African-American history represented a time of general instability for families, the era after the Civil War brought about total destabilization. Slaveholders had bought and sold slaves without regard for marital status. Now, what could the previously-sold male do when he returned to his previous plantation to reclaim his wife, only to find that she had remarried? How could a man reunite his family when he had fathered children on different plantations in different states? These were real-life questions that faced many former slaves in the aftermath of the American Civil War. Matriarchal leadership was deeply entrenched by this point in African-American history. For example, many freedmen were afraid to offer public support for Ulysses S. Grant in the 1868 presidential election. Their wives, however, proudly wore their husband’s pins and pictures of Grant. If husbands refused to hand over these items, wives were known to defy their husbands, boldly marching into town to buy their own. 5 For these women, emancipation provided confirmation of the spirit of self-sufficiency that they had learned in slavery. 6 The mother was “the supreme authority in the household,” so much so that daughters were reluctant to leave their mother’s household to live with their husbands. 7 After decades in which slaveholders had ignored marital relationships among slaves, former slaves viewed marriage as a means of economic cooperation instead of a covenant rooted in God’s creation and a fundamental basis for societal structuring. Wives described their marital arrangements not in terms of a lasting covenant but as “working with a man.” Such perspectives did little to promote meaningful roles for husbands and fathers. Until “the Great Migration” of African Americans 35
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J DFM 2.2 (2012): 96-108 Sermon: Ra
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education entails a world-and-life-
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