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This study will utilize the data in the 1967 SEO to present evidence on the size, composition, and concentration of net wealth accumulation among black families compared to white families. The final section presents and tests a simple econometric model of the estimated relationship between income and wealth for black and white families. In preparing this paper it is well understood that survey data are notoriously unreliable on assets and liabilities. Larger samples do not remove the errors if there is a tendency for a distinct subgroup to misreport its assets or liabilities. A rather extensive literature has evolved concerning the errors in survey data on assets and liabilities and is noted. At various stages of the analysis the findings from the SEO are compared to results from the comprehensive Survey of Financial Characteristics of Consumers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to explore the reaction of neighborhood housing prices to racial integration. What to property values when one or more African American families move into a previously all-white neighborhood? The answer arrived at in the analysis based on a study in scholar Ann Arbor. The data are analyzed in two different ways. First is an analysis is carried out on houses that sold at least two times-once before and once after neighborhood integration. For purposes of comparison, data on similarly-priced houses in all white areas are also included. However, it may be that integration affects property values some years after the first African American family moves into the neighborhood. Houses which sold twice at least five years subsequent to Negro entry are studied in an attempt to investigate any longer run effect of integration on property values. The second method uses assessed valuations of properties. Comparisons are made over time the basis of a ratio of market to assessed value for different neighborhoods and for different sections within a neighborhood. Trends established by these ratios over a number of years are examined to see if property values do react to integration and if so in what way.

The article presents a paper concerned with the cultural factors involved in the life and death struggle of the Afro-American family to maintain itself as a socio-economic unit in an urban area of economic blight. The anthropological concept of culture has provided the sociologist with valuable insights and opened up a rich field of investigation. Consequently it was decided to use the cultural approach to a deeper understanding of the social problems of the present group. It is the writer's opinion, based on field experience with both immigrant and Afro-American groups, that many of the findings on cultural disorganization of the immigrant apply as well to particular Afro-American groups in the large city, but as yet there has been little systematic application of this knowledge to the problems of these groups. Both the recent or new immigrants and the Afro-Americans migrating from the South, were for the most part rural people forced to adjust to the complex life of the modern city. Both were forced by economic pressure and ethnocentric prejudice to settle in the transitional areas of the city.

This study examined the relationship between labor force participation by more than one family member and the socioeconomic status of the family, as measured by the Census SES score. The data were derived from a special tabulation of the 1960 Census five percent sample tape. In general, labor force participation by more than one family member was associated with higher SES scores in both white and Negro families. Multiple wage earners in white families were associated with "above the middle" level scores, whereas in Negro families multiple wage earners appear to contribute to barely or almost attaining middle level scores. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper aggregate data are used to derive transition probability matrices for both black and white families. These describe the probability that a family in one income class will move to another in a single year. The average time for a family to move from one income class to another is then calculated from the probability estimates. The results indicate that, in addition to having a greater proportion of families in the lowest income classes, black families have a relative disadvantage in their chances of advancing to a higher income class. In particular, Iow-income black families have a smaller probability than whites of increasing their income, while middle- and high-income black families have a greater chance of a decline in income. The results indicate that the distribution of income for black families does not merely lag behind that of white families. Rather, it would appear that, ceteris paribus, the existing disparities will become even greater.
The results also show that the proportion of families in the lowest income class is steadily declining for both races, although the estimated average time for either a black or white family to escape from the under-$3000 level is very long. The average black family with income below $3000 can expect to spend twenty-one years at this income level before rising to a higher level, while a similarly situated white family can expect about nineteen additional years with income below $3000. These times are subject to considerable variability, however, and therefore individual families will spend a much longer or shorter time at the below-$3000 level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent events have reactivated controversy concerning two questions: (1) Is the low-income American Negro family showing "rapid deterioration" or continuance of low-standing patterns? (2) Are its patterns mainly rooted in the legacy of slavery? This analysis sees a long-standing picture rather than drastic change and relates family pattern primarily to postslavery conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a comment of the author on his paper related to some readjustments of the Negro family in 1944 and 1970. The nature of the reconsideration is obviously based upon the changes that have occurred in American race relations since the work was first published. The passage of time has not only allowed for a change of mind, but has compelled it. Therefore, his purpose here is to state succinctly how he viewed Negro family readjustment in the first instance and how he views it now. The advantage that he has in taking this approach is that an occasion for readjustment, as it existed then, also exists now. In 1944, his general concern was with the degree and manner in which an institution accommodates to new circumstances imposed upon it by the external environment in which it is enmeshed. Somehow he had the feeling that the methodological implications of the Spencerian organismic analogy could not be absolutely ignored. He felt that, like forms of organic life, an institution has a vital quality that facilitates its structural rearrangements when faced by an external condition that threatens its internal stability.

This article presents information related to the processes of cultural assimilation as revealed in the experiences of four generations of a North Carolina Negro family. The study begins with the generation that grew up in the cultural isolation of slavery and stretches down to the present generation of young students in North Carolina colleges. Perhaps the most significant characteristic of the slave Negro family was its enforced instability. This is not surprising, for it was practically impossible under the circumstances for slave families to develop stable patterns of organization and a strong tradition. Slave fathers developed tendencies of family irresponsibility and indifference. The result was the emergence of the maternal Negro family type. The slave home, like the slave family, was dominated by the institution of slavery. Homes of the field hands, who constituted the bulk of the slave population, were crude, box-like frame structures, with only the rudest furniture and utensils. The consequence of these practices was the dwarfing and inhibiting of those economic attitudes, values and habits which constitute one foundation of the stable family.

An empirical test is made of the idea that marital instability among present day blacks is importantly related to a family history of instability. Data from a sample of urban, northern blacks indicate that for the total sample the association between parental family instability and respondent's marital disruption is quite small. The correlation is higher in the middle class, and for middle class females the effect is particularly strong when the family break occurred early in life. However, parental family instability generally explains very little of the variance. The nature of the post-break living arrangements and the cause of the break are not importantly related to later marital instability, but there is evidence that the toss of the parent of the same sex through death has a stronger effect than the loss of the parent of the opposite sex. It is suggested that pre-marital traits are not highly correlated with marital stability and that parental family instability is particularly weak because it is tenuously tied to the intervening variables between it and respondent's marital stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Permanent homes must be found for the eighty thousand homeless black children in this country. Social work's solution has been. biracial adoption. The author points up the dangers of such an approach both to the black child and the white adoptive parents. Although he does not advocate total abandonment of biracial adopt ion, he concludes that in this society only black families can assure environment in which there is optimal opportunity for growth, development, and identification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The values of income quintiles, for black and white families separately, for the period 1947-68 are analyzed within the framework of a growth-unemployment model. Some principal results of the analysis are: (1) In all segments of the income distribution, growth rates of income are higher among black families than among white families when the unemployment rate is low. (2) In the middle range of income distribution, rising unemployment is more disadvantageous to black families than to white families. (3) At a stable 3.5 percent unemployment rate, equality of incomes could be achieved in about 25 years. (4) If unemployment rises to a stable 4.5 percent rate as a result of federal anti-inflationary actions, black families bear a social cost that can be measured in terms of the additional time required to achieve equality--another 25 years. (5) During a period when incomes of black families are growing more rapidly than those of white families, the absolute differences, or gap, will increase to a maximum and then decline. Thus an apparent paradox observed previously in the data can be explained by the growth-unemployment model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A study of Negro housing in Toledo, Ohio tested some common assumptions about race and housing and discovered a post-war transition from renter to owner status for the Negro. The study explored the means by which Negro families had financed purchases of homes, the quality of the homes, comparative prices, and the economic status of the Negro families concerned. Some implications of these findings are noted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the results of a study on medical care costs of white and Negro households in the southern rural areas of the United States. It was found that many southern rural families do without any medical care. This is attributed to the indifference of doctors. Most doctors are urban-oriented, accept patients by appointment only, and tend to bypass distant rural home calls. Further compounding the issue are the meager incomes of southern ruralities, the distances they live from available medical help, and charges of town physicians for remote home calls. The data shows that Negroes, largely because of poverty, neglect their health more than whites. They tend to be oriented to traditional and personal values rather than to professional, scientific, and rationalistic values of organized medicine. Southern rural poor whites and poor Negroes have most economic problems in common, including those of medical care. In gross numbers, however, poor white families outnumber poor Negro families in a ratio of three to one, at least in the 27 counties surveyed.