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A FRICAN AMERICAN family formation patterns have been the subject of modern scholarship and debate for nearly one full century. Beginning with Du Bois's (1899, 1908) landmark studies of the black community in Philadelphia, social scientific inquiry has variously considered black families as adaptive, resilient, deviant, pathological, culturally distinctive, African retentive, and" just like yours." The particular form of the debate, and the direction of the research, have often been shaped by the politics of the moment—as evidenced by the reaction to Daniel Patrick Moynihan's (1967) now infamous" report" on the Negro family and the recent response to the" family values” theme of the 1992 presidential race (which many regarded as a thinly veiled attack on nonnuclear families).

We begin this chapter with a brief overview of the major thematic trends in research on African American family formation. Because a number of extensive reviews are available, we will not review the findings of the vast literature on the African American family (Billingsley, 1992; Hill, 1993; Taylor et al., 1991). Rather, our objective is to identify scholarly directions and the forces that appear to have shaped the research agenda over time. We will then examine the general and ethnic specific patterns of family formation and related indicators over the last fifty years in the United States, in order to detail the character and context of change among African Americans. Finally, the primary conceptual approaches that have been employed to interpret recent trends in black marriage will be considered.