Hurtin' Words: Debating Family Problems in the Twentieth-Century South

By Ted Ownby

When Tammy Wynette sang "D-I-V-O-R-C-E," she famously said she "spelled out the hurtin' words" to spare her child the pain of family breakup. In this innovative work, Ted Ownby considers how a wide range of writers, thinkers, activists, and others defined family problems in the twentieth-century American South. Ownby shows that it was common for both African Americans and whites to discuss family life in terms of crisis, but they reached very different conclusions about causes and solutions. In the civil rights period, many embraced an ideal of Christian brotherhood as a way of transcending divisions. Opponents of civil rights denounced "brotherhoodism" as a movement that undercut parental and religious authority. Others, especially in the African American community, rejected the idea of family crisis altogether, working to redefine family adaptability as a source of strength. Rather than attempting to define the experience of an archetypal "southern family," Ownby looks broadly at contexts such as political and religious debates about divorce and family values, southern rock music, autobiographies, and more to reveal how people in the South used the concept of the family as a proxy for imagining a better future or happier past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Oct 31, 2018
• ISBN: 9781469647012

Ted Ownby

Ted Ownby is William F. Winter Professor of History and professor of southern studies at the University of Mississippi. He is editor of The Role of Ideas in the Civil Rights South, Manners and Southern History, The Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi, and Black and White: Cultural Interaction in the Antebellum South and coeditor of Clothing and Fashion in Southern History, The Mississippi Encyclopedia, and Southern Religion, Southern Culture: Essays Honoring Charles Reagan Wilson, all published by University Press of Mississippi.

Book preview

HURTIN’ WORDS

NEW DIRECTIONS IN SOUTHERN STUDIES

Editor

Charles Reagan Wilson

Editorial Advisory Board

Robert Brinkmeyer

Thomas Holt

Anne Goodwyn Jones

Alfred J. Lopez

Charles Marsh

Ted Ownby

Tom Rankin

Jon Michael Spencer

Allen Tullos

Patricia Yaeger

This series is devoted to opening new lines of analysis of the American South and to becoming a site for redefining southern studies, encouraging new interpretations of the region’s past and present. The series publishes works on the twentieth century that address the cultural dimensions of subjects such as literature, language, music, art, folklife, documentary studies, race relations, ethnicity, gender, social class, religion, and the environment.

HURTIN’ WORDS

DEBATING FAMILY PROBLEMS IN THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY SOUTH

Ted Ownby

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

CHAPEL HILL

This book was published with the assistance of the Fred W. Morrison Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

© 2018 Ted Ownby

All rights reserved

Designed by April Leidig

Set in Arnhem by Copperline Book Services, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Cover illustration: Old Man Comforting Child, Toni Frissell, photographer, ca. 1962; courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ownby, Ted, author.

Title: Hurtin’ words : debating family problems in the twentieth-century South / Ted Ownby.

Other titles: New directions in southern studies.

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [2018] | Series: New directions in southern studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018020259| ISBN 9781469646992 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469647005 (pbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469647012 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Families—Southern States. | Families—Public opinion—History—20th century. | Social problems—Public opinion—History—20th century. | Southern States—Social conditions—20th century. | Southern States—Race relations—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC HQ541 .O96 2018 | DDC 306.85097509/04—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018020259

To colleagues and students

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Note on Permissions

Introduction

1 | Family Crises or Home Remedies: Defining the Problems among African Americans and Whites in the South, 1890s–1930s

2 | Yours for the Cause of Peace and Brotherhood, 1930s–1960s

3 | The White Man’s Holy Institution of Matrimony: Massive Resistance as a Movement for Family Protection, 1950s–1960s

4 | The Only American Community Where Men Call Each Other Brother When They Meet: Redefining Brotherhood and Sisterhood in the 1960s

5 | Hurtin’ Words, Free Bird, and Family Values: Defining Family Crises among White Southerners in the 1970s

6 | Not a Problem People: Rejecting Family Crisis in the 1970s and 1980s

Afterword

Notes

Bibliography

Index

FIGURES

Margaret Murray Washington, ca. 1910–15

Walker Evans photograph of Lily Rogers Fields and baby on porch, 1936

Herblock cartoon, Pray Keep Moving, Brother, 1960

Cover of Sarah Patton Boyle’s For Human Beings Only (1964)

Brotherhood by Bayonet cartoon, Manchester Union Leader, September 26, 1957

Social Gospel cartoon, Citizens’ Council, August 1957

Coretta and Martin King Christmas card, 1967

Cover of Tammy Wynette’s album D-I-V-O-R-C-E, 1968

Excerpts from Thomas B. Warren’s book Keeping the Lock in Wedlock (1980)

Alex Haley, 1979

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS BOOK TOOK A LONG TIME, in part because for some time I did not realize I was writing it. It emerged from numerous papers, lectures, and research that finally came together in this volume. Above all, it emerged from discussions with colleagues and students in southern history and southern studies—the colleagues and students to whom I dedicate the book.

Thanks to friends who helped with chapter 1. My discussion about multiple agrarianisms among white southerners emerged from an invitation to speak at a colloquium on Southern Poverty between the Wars run by the David Bruce Centre for American Studies at Keele University. Thanks to Martin Crawford, Richard Godden, and Robert Garson for the invitation and for including that paper in a volume published by the University of Georgia Press. Comments from Richard King, Stuart Kidd, and the editors helped improve that paper. I continued to discuss that topic at the southern history seminar at the University of Virginia, thanks to Grace Hale. I published an essay on Mississippi home extension worker Dorothy Dickins in a volume coedited by Elizabeth Payne, Martha Swain, and Marjorie Spruill and published by the University of Georgia Press. I first discussed E. Franklin Frazier and David Cohn at the conferences of the Southern American Studies Association and the Popular Culture Association of the South. Thanks to comments from Tom Bonner.

Chapters 2 through 4 have a long history, because for years I was unsure how to deal with the topic of brotherhood and its critics. Thanks to Charles Marsh and other friends at the University of Virginia’s Project on Lived Theology, where I first had an inkling that the topic was worth the trouble. An invitation from Charles, along with colleagues Peter Slade and Peter Heltzel, gave me a chance to write about brotherhood in the work of John Perkins, a topic I mention in the afterword. And thanks to Lisa Dorr at the University of Alabama, where I first talked about brotherhood at a conference on race and history. I continued to talk about brotherhood at the Southern American Studies Association at Louisiana State University, where I received comments by Gaines Foster and John Lowe, at the University of Virginia for another visit, where Grace Hale, John Mason, Elizabeth Varon, and Joseph Thompson all offered suggestions, at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History at the invitation of Christine Wilson, at Flagler College, where Mike Butler contributed music knowledge and Catherine Clinton happened to be in town to add comments, at the Institut Catholique de Paris at the invitation of Ineke Bockting, and at the University of Arkansas at the invitation of Angie Maxwell and Calvin White. Melissa Walker and Peter Bardaglio commented on a pretty speculative paper at the Southern Association of Women Historians conference, and Charles Joyner, Bob Brinkmeyer, and others discussed a paper on massive resistance at the Southern Studies Forum in Columbia. A grant from the Institute for Southern Studies at the University of South Carolina supported my research in political archives at the USC library.

Legal history is not my field, so thanks to colleagues who helped me think about the history of divorce law and practice. I delivered a paper that became part of chapter 5 at a session of the Southern Historical Association and benefited from comments by Glenda Gilmore and Trent Brown. University of Mississippi colleagues Nancy Bercaw and Robert Haws discussed one version of the paper, and colleagues Sheila Skemp, Deirdre Cooper Owens, Anne Twitty, Mikaela Adams, Marc Lerner, and John Ondrovcik discussed another. I have talked even longer about the history of southern rock music, with early suggestions by David Nelson, then a Southern Historical Association session with Bill Malone and Cheryl Thurber, a lecture at Tennessee Technological University at the invitation of Kriste Lindenmeyer, and then in an essay edited by Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan Donaldson and published by the University of Virginia Press. A short talk at the International Country Music Conference on Elvis Presley in 1956 led to useful discussions with Michael Bertrand and Charles Hughes. My work on Donald Wildmon and the American Family Association started at the invitation of Glenn Feldman to write an essay for his University Press of Kentucky collection, Politics and Religion in the White South.

I first talked about autobiographical advice literature at a session of the Southern Studies Forum meeting at Palacky University in the Czech city of Olomouc, with helpful discussions with Mark Newman, Noel Polk, Suzanne Jones, and others. I continued to think about the topic at a session on autobiography at the Southern Historical Association conference, with comments by Kathryn Nystrom, Susan Cahn, and Jennifer Jensen Wallach, and at a session on 1970s autobiography and memory at the Organization of American Historians conference. I talked about Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the American Studies Association, and friends John Howard and John T. Edge later made suggestions on that paper. I talked broadly about the 1970s and issues of gender at a Phi Alpha Theta event at Austin Peay State University, where Minoa Uffelman invited me to speak, and at the Banners Series at McNeese State University at the invitation of Janet Allured. I have lectured twice about Habitat for Humanity, once at St. Anselm College at the invitation of Andrew Moore for a conference on 1976: The Year of the Evangelical, and once at Duke’s Divinity School at the invitation of Lauren Winner, a member of the Project on Lived Theology group that was so important to this project. I discussed Alex Haley’s Roots and the Black Family Reunion at the Black Love Symposium, co-organized by Randal Jelks and Ayesha Hardison at the University of Kansas and at a University of Mississippi event, where Charles Ross raised helpful questions.

I list these conferences and friends in part to say thanks to people who invite scholars to conferences and in part to make the point that such events often matter far more than they might seem at the time. Academic collaboration works, sometimes through organized planning, sometimes through good luck that comes from having thoughtful people in the same place. And thanks to my academic home, the University of Mississippi, which helped send me to many of those events and gave me one sabbatical to get this project started in a tour of southern archives and another to hide away and edit long enough to get it finished.

And cheers to librarians and archivists. Thanks to people at the institutions I mention in the bibliography, and special thanks to Bill Sumners at the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives, to David Roebuck at the Hal Bernard Dixon Jr. Pentecostal Research Center at Lee University, and to Courtney Chartier at Emory. When I showed up at the Amistad Research Center at Tulane drenched with sweat after misjudging some distances and the New Orleans weather, the archivists said things like that happen fairly often. This volume’s first piece of evidence comes from the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina, which was, as always, an ideal setting for research in southern history, and this project benefited a great deal for specialized collections at Vanderbilt, Howard, the University of Georgia, the Atlanta University Center, the University of South Carolina, the University of Virginia, and the Library of Congress. Above all, thanks to friends in Special Collections at the University of Mississippi, where Jennifer Ford, Leigh McWhite, and Greg Johnson always seem to appreciate a research challenge.

Thanks to patient and professional friends at the University of North Carolina Press, including Mark Simpson-Vos, Jessica Newman, Jay Mazzocchi, Lucas Church, Laura Jones Dooley, and two helpful reviewers. I think I first discussed this project with David Perry.

I have the pleasure of thanking my colleagues at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and the History Department at the University of Mississippi. I have talked about this project on my own campus in four or five public lectures and countless individual discussions. Thanks to four History chairs, Robert Haws, Joe Ward, Noell Wilson, and Jeff Watt, two directors of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, William Ferris and Charles Reagan Wilson, and two deans, Glen Hopkins and Lee Cohen. Particular thanks to Charles Wilson, longtime friend and the director of the New Directions in Southern Studies series for the University of North Carolina Press, for years of discussing the field of Southern Studies. For ideas and inspiration of all sorts, thanks to my colleagues, past and present, at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, Katie McKee, Becca Walton, Jimmy Thomas, Odie Lindsey, John T. Edge, Nancy Bercaw, Adam Gussow, Simone Delerme, Jodi Skipper, David Wharton, Ann Abadie, Andy Harper, Darren Grem, Jessica Wilkerson, Catarina Passidomo, Brian Foster, Rebecca Cleary, LaTonya Pittman, Sally Lyon, Margaret Gaffney, Sarah Dixon Pegues, Donna Crenshaw, Joe York, Mark Camarigg, Melanie Young, Mary Beth Lasseter, Melissa Hall, and Mary Hartwell Howorth, and former faculty colleagues Barbara Combs, Zandria Robinson, Bob Brinkmeyer, Michele Coffey, William Ferris, Tom Rankin, Robbie Ethridge, Justin Nystrom, and Jill Cooley. Odie Lindsey helped with some editing, and Jimmy Thomas helped with the illustrations.

And thanks to Elizabeth Engelhardt.

Thanks also to many students in the Southern Studies program and History Department who have heard about parts of this project and responded by discussing, challenging, and occasionally changing the subject.

It seems fitting to acknowledge the influence of two deceased friends who influenced my scholarship, my long-ago dissertation director, John Higham, who liked books that tried to do multiple things, and colleague Winthrop Jordan, who liked interesting questions.

Acknowledgments often end with thanks to family members. I will avoid doing that, because I do not want any readers to imagine I’m idealizing or rejecting particular definitions of family life before the book even gets started.

NOTE ON PERMISSIONS

I AM USING my previously published material, sometimes quoted, sometimes summarized or reconceptualized, always footnoted, from the following published papers: Brotherhood and Its Limits, in Mobilizing for the Common Good: The Lived Theology of John M. Perkins, edited by Peter Slade, Charles Marsh, and Peter Goodwin Heltzel (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013); Donald Wildmon, the American Family Association, and the Theology of Media Activism, in Politics and Religion in the White South, edited by Glenn Feldman (Louisville: University Press of Kentucky, 2005); Freedom, Manhood, and Male Tradition in 1970s Southern Rock Music, in Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts, edited by Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan V. Donaldson (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998); Gladys Presley, Dorothy Dickins, and the Limits of Female Agrarianism in Twentieth-Century Mississippi, in Mississippi Women: Their Histories, Their Lives, edited by Elizabeth Ann Payne, Martha H. Swain, and Marjorie Julian Spruill, associate editor, Susan Ditto (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010); and Three Agrarianisms and the Idea of a South without Poverty, in Reading Southern Poverty between the Wars, edited by Martin Crawford and Richard Godden (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006). Thanks to the University Press of Mississippi, the University of Georgia Press, the University of Virginia Press, and the University Press of Kentucky for permissions.

HURTIN’ WORDS

INTRODUCTION

WHAT MIGHT WE LEARN from a book on how people in the twentieth-century American South defined the problems of family life? Just a few moments from the summer of 2016 suggest some possibilities. Mississippi House Bill 1523, called the Religious Liberty Accommodations Act, claimed to protect people who believed that marriage should only unite one man and one woman from any laws or codes that might force them to marry or serve same-sex couples. When a U.S. district judge ruled that the law was unconstitutional, he compared it to Jim Crow laws that claimed to protect white people from laws that might force them into unwanted contact with African Americans. In the same summer, one of the first testimonials about Alton Sterling, the victim of a police killing in Baton Rouge, came from a friend who called him just a brother who was working to support his family. One of many responses to police violence that summer came from former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who claimed that there would be less violence, crime, and unrest if more black fathers would teach their children how to behave. The Democratic National Convention welcomed a group of women, called Mothers of the Movement, whose children had been killed by police officers. An internet story that turned out to be a hoax claimed that Hillary Clinton’s book It Takes a Village argued that government was the most important agency in raising children and that parents were of minimal importance.

In just a few weeks, then, people in the public eye had offered images of grieving parents, failing parents, and irrelevant parents to raise questions about the definition of marriage, the concept of brotherhood, the idea of African American family crisis, and the proper role of government. Many of those questions involved issues of race, and all involved law and government. The questions had to do with the most significant issues we can study—love and religion, living and dying, sexuality, and freedom and social order.

Hurtin’ Words examines the history behind such topics by examining how different people in the twentieth-century South defined the problems of family life. Using a wide range of sources, especially sources from writers, scholars, activists, and other cultural leaders, this volume studies arguments about how people defined families, what problems they believed different families faced, and how those definitions changed.

To some readers, family life and the American South might seem a dull or outdated topic—dull if it seems rooted in nostalgia about family reunions on old porches and funny stories about the sayings of grandparents or outdated if it evokes southern literature in which tormented characters agonize over failed patriarchies and painful secrets. For scholars it can be unfortunate that the concept of the family, in the South and beyond, generates so many easy clichés. From universities to sports teams to popular magazines, so many groups love to claim that they are just like families that the concept can seem almost too innocuous for meaningful study.¹ I have heard multiple historians of the Southern Historical Association say that they feel the organization is like a family. Other clichés come just as easily, with politicians addressing the problems of working families, parents talking about family time, movies and restaurants describing themselves as family-style or family-friendly, and many people in many settings claiming that family is the only thing that really matters.

So, it’s not easy writing about family life and the South. But it is necessary, because people have thought about the concept so much and in so many ways.

This book analyzes the idea of family life by studying how people defined problems. There was and is no such thing as the southern family, and we shouldn’t look for it. Nor was there a southern sense of family. There was not a distinctive family structure, an iconic family narrative, a central theme or dominant narrative that defined southern family life, or any of those big, broad claims that scholars used to make and lots of nonscholars still make pretty freely when they talk about the American South. This volume considers the multiplicity of narratives, whether they were popular or on the fringes, old or new, part of a dominating group or a group challenging people in power, or something else. Most importantly, it studies how those narratives related to each other.

Hurtin’ Words studies people who used their understandings about how family life should work as ways to define problems and consider their solutions. Among the problems are these:

1. The idea that African American family life faced extraordinary difficulties. Some people blamed poverty, criminality, and many other problems on family difficulties; others said oppression caused family problems; and others held up examples of successful family life as examples of overcoming those problems. The idea of African American family life as a constant or recurring crisis has been a controversial and often frustrating point of continuity in southern history.

2. Worries that various social changes were challenging the stability that so many white southerners liked to assume about their own families, especially on farms.

3. The possibility that the idea of the brotherhood of mankind pointed to a new definition of family relationships. For some, brotherhood was a problem because it challenged conceptions of racial difference and fatherly authority. For others, brotherhood posed a problem because it was so difficult to achieve.

4. The urge to redefine family as an adaptable institution that could take many shapes. The idea of the adaptable family was liberating for many people but also frightening to some.

5. The belief that those alternative definitions of family life led to amorality and, if expanded, to a society without values and authority. We could call this the problem of family values—people who believed in a single, clear definition of family life often believed that people with different definitions of family life lacked values.

Any of these topics could by themselves be the subjects of interesting, useful, and well-focused studies, and in fact there are excellent scholarly works on African American family life, the ideals and struggles of white families on farms and in the transition to nonfarm labor, on activist religion before, during, and since the civil rights movement, on southern feminist movements, on gay and lesbian stories in the South, and on family values religion.² But the significance of those issues becomes deeper when we analyze them as part of an ongoing series of intersecting stories. This volume begins in the early twentieth century, when both African Americans and whites dwelled a great deal on African American family problems, drawing dramatically different conclusions. It moves to the civil rights period, when issues of Christian brotherhood and controversies about school desegregation and the Moynihan Report changed the subjects and language of debates about family problems. Concluding chapters discuss the South since the 1970s, when white southerners raised new concerns about crises in white families and numerous groups rejected notions of crisis in favor of new concepts about the adaptability and creativity of family life.

Definitions of family problems repeatedly came into conflict. Brotherhood mattered in part because it faced resistance from people advocating more powerful versions of fatherhood. Reforms in divorce law mattered in part because they challenged assumptions that families should be built on lifelong relationships. The religious groups that used the term family values make more sense in light of movements that imagined adaptable definitions of family life. The recurring arguments about the problems of African American family life mattered in part because of African Americans’ frustration with the persistence of those ideas. Southern whites consistently contrasted their family lives to those of African Americans, and both frequently compared themselves to broadly national ideals about middle-class families. Many of these arguments were going on at the same time, sometimes as public debates and often as multiple discussions with numerous starting points.

Examining southern life through a lens of family problems offers a new approach to familiar topics: family and race, family and home, family and religion, family and education, family and civil rights, family and feminism, family and social stability, family and social reform, and many more. But seeing the intersections of how different people defined the problems of family life goes beyond seeing each of those issues and the political language connected to them. For people who believed that family meant a lifelong relationship based on biology or access to land, household, and family name, talking about family meant talking about permanent relationships and the values that supported them. At the same time, for people who imagined different and challenging definitions of family life, the concept of family was particularly compelling because they were making and remaking big new decisions. In either case, language about family life very often meant that people were dealing not just with momentary problems but with deep relationships and deep connections.

In stating that this volume is about how people defined problems, it might be helpful to clarify that it is not a work of social science. Although it sometimes studies works by social scientists like E. Franklin Frazier, Margaret Jarman Hagood, Joyce Ladner, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, it is not doing the work of social scientists. For example, it does not trace changes in household size, and it does not work to characterize groups defined as families as nuclear or extended, affectionate or disciplined, matriarchal, matrifocal, or matrilineal, or patriarchal, patrifocal, or patrilineal. Instead of trying to reach through family language to understand the structures of everyday life, this is a book about how people used the concept of the family to argue about all sorts of issues, to love parts of life and dislike others, to imagine a better future or a happier past, to consider the difference between the permanent and the temporary, and sometimes just to address the concept with fully human confusion.

Scholarship on the history of family life has had an intriguing history, with moments of great scholarly excitement and periods of only moderate popularity. Family history emerged in the 1960s and 1970s as an ambitious and respected subfield of the larger movement for an everyday social history that could get inside homes, gender constructions, and intimate relationships. As an important component of the history of private life, family history developed as one of several efforts by historians who wanted to move away from concentrating on the histories of kings and queens and presidents and generals.

In the decades that followed, the field of family history underwent major changes due largely to dissatisfaction about two related topics. In American and European history, a great deal of scholarship investigated the rise of middle-class families and the range of meanings of separate spheres for women in homes and men at work. Scholars in the 1980s and 1990s grew frustrated that questions about separate spheres left out far too many people who could never separate paid labor from home life. So, studying the diversity of family experiences meant moving away from a nuclear and affectionate family ideal as a defining feature of family history. The very title of the best survey of family history, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, by Stephanie Coontz, rejects an image that American family history pointed toward happy nuclear families.³

A second challenge rejected the possibility of separating private life from issues in the public spheres of law and policy. Many scholars became frustrated with a field that seemed to leave out people who did not belong to conventionally defined families, and it seems likely that some scholars grew troubled with studying something called the family when conservative groups were claiming the family as their domain and referring to feminist, multicultural, and LGBTQ movements as antifamily. For a generation or so, topics of sexuality, gender, race, and violence attracted more scholarly attention than family life.

In the study of the South, a family history that was more or less separate from issues of power had never been a possibility. Scholars whose work responded to the issues in the 1965 Moynihan Report debated whether the institution of slavery weakened the families of enslaved people or whether enslaved people found creative ways of resistance through the shape and meaning of their family lives.⁴ A related and often controversial topic involved the concept of paternalism, as scholars analyzed the power relations within institutions that were run by people who claimed to treat others whose work they controlled as members of their households. Eugene Genovese and many others studied the many ramifications of a society whose most powerful figures liked to write about my family, black and white.⁵ Other scholars led by Stephanie McCurry analyzed the concept of patriarchy as something that united free men, wealthy and nonwealthy, and distinguished them from African Americans, women, and all other people they deemed dependent.⁶ Studying farm life and its changes in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a number of scholars (few of whom advertised themselves as family historians) mixed issues of family life and gender with work, activism, government, and sometimes recreation and memory.⁷ And another group of scholars, again not referring to themselves as family historians, analyzed women’s arguments about family and respectability as part of organizing and activism, whether they discussed respectability politics or the family language of social reform movements from prohibition to antilynching.⁸

In the past twenty years, government policy has become absolutely central to scholarship that analyzes families as part of studying gender and power. In southern history, the 2000 essay collection Jumpin’ Jim Crow dramatized the successes of a gendered history of politics (or political history of gender), with influential essays connecting gender, race, and sexuality to the book’s subtitle, Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights.⁹ Works by Tera Hunter, Dylan Penningroth, and Heather Andrea Williams show that the interaction of African American family-making during slavery and Reconstruction were essential to issues of government policy, not as separate from it.¹⁰ More broadly, policy-conscious histories of family life, full of conflict and multiplicity, are studying marriage and divorce, abortion and reproductive rights, race and eugenics, and same-sex relationships, all as they relate to the law and efforts to change or enforce the law.¹¹ In an influential work that finds family issues almost everywhere, Robert O. Self’s All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy since the 1960s asserts that Americans rarely fought about equality, power, and money without invoking one idealized version of family or another.¹² Overcoming the problems that family history seemed too much about private life, that it did not properly address issues of power, and that it left out people who did not fit into conventionally defined families, such scholarship has dramatically expanded the meaning of family history.

I hope this volume contributes to that literature, especially through its attention to cultural expression, multiple perspectives, and change over several generations. Some works that emphasize family policy seem to me to move too quickly past how people understood problems to the more specific questions of how they enacted solutions. Understanding this volume as an examination of how people defined family problems means studying policies as interconnected with all sorts of topics in religion, music, and autobiography, as well as in activism, law, and government. I hope that discussing the concept of family crisis as an ongoing process of redefinition means that we can study both family policies and family ideals, as people thought, wrote, talked, and sang about their most basic assumptions as well as strategies for government policy.

Perhaps telling the story of how this volume came together will clarify its purpose. I did not set out to write a book about family life. The first glimmer of this project began when, writing as a scholar of gender and masculinity, I completed a short essay on southern rock music of the 1970s. That essay took a pretty conventional southern studies approach for its day, asking which themes from the traditions of white southern manhood were useful to those musicians and which themes they altered or rejected. What I hope I learned from that paper, published in 1998, was that family life was crucial in how those young white men identified what they were not. In their songs they claimed that they were born on the move and were not going to fit into any family definitions their society might expect of them. They did not expect to live with the same woman for a long time, and they said that being rambling men free of all commitments was the most important thing they could sing about.¹³ I did not know it at the time, but that article was the start of this volume, because it suggested that the history of family life often exists as a form of opposition in which people use the concept of the family to say who they are not just as much as who they are. That perspective has a great deal to do with this book, which understands the concept of family life as one of boundaries and oppositions.

This project emerged over the next couple of decades, as scholars in southern history and southern studies worked to rethink the study of the South without starting with the perspectives of white men and women who claimed the region and its history as their own. Frustrated with scholarship on the South that started so frequently with racist politicians or Confederate elites or William Faulkner or V. O. Key or W. J. Cash or Vanderbilt Agrarians, scholars have worked to find ways to tell complicated, multivocal stories of the South that cut across lines of race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and plenty of other categories. Closely connected, the early years of this project coincided with the declining popularity of the search for central themes. When I began this venture, the idea of a book on The Southern Family in the Twentieth Century seemed as if it might belong to older, central-theme-seeking generations of scholarship. I first imagined this volume as a collection of loosely related articles bound not by an argument but by an approach showing that family life in the American South had different meanings for different people. The importance of multiplicity can be an easy point to make, and it is certainly useful in rejecting central themes and dominant narratives. But multiplicity is rarely a meaningful conclusion, and it is not at all satisfying as a story. To understand history, we want to know not simply that there were multiple things going on but how those things were related. This book started to take its shape with the idea that the various definitions of family problems made sense only as arguments with other definitions. Thus, a collection of essays became, I hope, chapters that tell a story that emerges from interconnected stories.

One of the more vexing issues in writing this book has been how best to study how people defined problems. I started to clarify how to study problem-defining as I prepared a paper for a Keele University conference called Writing Southern Poverty between the Wars. That paper, Three Agrarianisms and the Idea of a South without Poverty, published in 2006, argued that many white southern political and intellectual leaders believed that people could not really be poor as long as they lived on farms and in groups, usually defined as families. That paper helped formulate the goals of this project because it began with a topic everyone agreed was crucial to understanding the South—poverty—and argued that only some people even saw it as a problem.¹⁴ One could make a similar point that a great deal of scholarship on the South has started with issues family life, but we need more and better discussions of how to study family problems. Discussing this project over the years, I have found myself emphasizing that it is not specifically about family life; rather, it is about how different people defined the problem of family life. It asks who defined the problems, who they said had problems, how they wanted to address those problems, and how some definitions related to others.

While I was working to organize this book, I spent a year attending events with scholars and activists in the Project on Lived Theology, run by Charles Marsh and his colleagues at the University of Virginia. One of the main challenges of the project that year was to understand the theological languages and commitments of civil rights activists. I was all for that, and it was in those discussions, and from reading work by Sarah Patton Boyle alongside Martin Luther King Jr., that I begin to imagine how the concept of brotherhood might relate to other ideas about family problems. The language seemed significant enough to keep studying, though my first presentations on the topic were awfully hesitant, worried that brotherhood might seem awfully vague, naive, and male. I grew impressed by the range of ways brotherhood mattered to so many civil rights activists, and I also grew intrigued by the vehemence with which massive resistance figures condemned brotherhoodism and instead insisted on the languages of parental rights and African American family crisis.

Teaching in a southern studies program no doubt influenced my choice of sources. Southern studies scholars have moved away from imagining any texts as region-defining or iconic, or canonical. Scholars thus have the opportunity and pleasure to study all sorts of sources. To demonstrate that ideas about family problems had multiple meanings and moved in multiple directions, this book uses many sources and tries not to dwell too long on any single source or type of source. So, some of the people famous for their role in thinking about family and gender issues (Jerry Falwell, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Alice Walker, for instance) make appearances, but divorce lawyers and judges, Church of Christ ministers, civil rights workers, home extension agents, Black Family Reunion organizers, massive resistance letterwriters, autobiographers, advice writers, and southern rock musicians are just as important. My criteria for choosing sources were broad but fairly clear: I tried to use sources that directly addressed issues of family life, its definitions, problems, and solutions. Except for sections of the final chapter, this volume stays away from literary analysis in part out of fear that some of those sources (Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! for instance, or several Tennessee Williams plays) that once seemed region-defining and canonical might dominate the narrative, but in part also because of my own lack of scholarly training in literary studies.

I have personal as well as scholarly interests in the history of the 1970s. I was in my teens when Roots came on television, when Free Bird was a favorite song of many of my friends, and when the Religious Right had its first successes blending politics, religion, and media. I did not notice it, but that was the same period when Habitat for Humanity was building its first homes and when judges, lawyers, and unhappily married people were working out the meanings of divorce reform. For much of my life, I have been wondering what these things had to do with each other.

The title of this volume, Hurtin’ Words, indicates that the volume is about the complications in thinking about family problems. The title comes from the lyrics of a country song made famous by Tammy Wynette. As chapter 5 discusses, D-I-V-O-R-C-E is a painful song about trying to keep an impending divorce quiet by spelling out the hurtin’ words around the child who does not yet know his parents are divorcing. So, the song is about a family crisis in which people feel free to say some things out loud but other things only in half-secret, by spelling them out. Hurtin’ words works as the title of this book in part because it emphasizes the words. The volume is not trying to cut through words to get at family realities—it studies the words people used in defining problems. Just as important, the term hurtin’ words dramatizes how difficult the subject of family problems can be. Often, discussing family problems is about hurtin’ within a group that thinks or once thought of itself as a family. Often, talking about other people’s family problems is hurtful and insulting. For example, white southerners’ repeated discussions about African American family problems, and right-wing denunciations of same-sex marriage, are hurting words. Often, talking about family problems is about high ideals and the hurting that comes from not reaching them. For example, the numerous calls to live out the goals of brotherhood involved painful words about the sacrifices of living up to an ideal that was difficult to achieve. And often, the language of family crisis is the language of lamenting how things went wrong. In a scene in a documentary film, Will D. Campbell told the story of the first family, in which Adam and Eve wondered what had gone wrong when one of their sons had killed another. Campbell imagines Adam saying, Oh my God, why can’t we go back to the good old-fashioned values—Why can’t we go back to the way things used to be?¹⁵

Chapter 1 offers a comparison about definitions of family problems from the late 1800s through the 1930s. Both black and white southerners discussed an ongoing crisis of African American family life at great length and with considerable disagreement about whether they should explain that crisis, fix the problems that caused it, improve the nature of family life itself, or pass laws to protect white people against its consequences. Government policies did little to address the apparent problems; laws about racial segregation and racial definition were among many efforts white leaders made to protect white families from the problems African Americans seemed to represent. By comparison, white southerners who discussed white families imagined that most had stable and more or less satisfying families, especially when they lived on farms. Whether conservative or liberal, many white southerners supported government policies they hoped would protect the virtues they associated with stable home life. Legal cases about divorce displayed the assumption that families were supposed to function as lifelong institutions except in the rarest cases. The opposition the first chapter introduces between ideas about family crisis among African Americans and family protection for white southerners is crucial for understanding the chapters that follow. Also crucial are African Americans’ frustrations with the argument that it was their families that were both in trouble and causing trouble.

Chapters 2, 3, and 4 take seriously the concept of brotherhood, which emerged early in the civil rights years as a family definition with the potential to undermine many hierarchies, especially assumptions and arguments about the concept of race. Long a concept related to kindness and face-to-face respect, brotherhood became a crucial idea for many Christians, African American and white, who wanted reform to get deeper inside human relationships than legal solutions to problems of racism seemed to promise. Proponents of brotherhood challenged ideas that people’s identities were fixed at birth and assumptions that patriarchal control was the only route to peace in society. Chapter 2 is the volume’s longest chapter, in part because the only way to demonstrate the significance of brotherhood is to quote lots of people who wrote or talked about it.

Chapters 3 and 4 analyze opposition to brotherhood and redefinitions of the concept. The rise of brotherhood as a language of egalitarian family relationships inspired the counterconcept of brotherhoodism, a term that southern conservatives found useful for arguing that brotherhood could undermine all authority and any standards of right and wrong. In fact, brotherhood seemed to them part of a crisis of white family life. Instead of brotherhood, they clung to parenthood as the essential family relationship. School desegregation, they argued, undermined the authority of parents at the same time that it brought white children together with African Americans raised in what they considered to be disastrous family backgrounds.

In the mid-1960s, as chapter 4 shows, it became imperative for civil rights activists to reject ideas about African American family crisis, and African American activists began developing new ways to celebrate the strength and adaptability of family life. Once again, brotherhood seemed to pose a crisis, this time one threatening to undermine African American autonomy with a too-mild, perhaps naive definition of racial integration. At about the same time, many African Americans began to claim the concept of brothers and sisters not as an element of desegregation but as part of an identity that united people who had faced similar forms of insult and terror. Brother and sister became synonyms for black man and black woman, and sisters made new efforts to redefine sisterhood in ways that rejected the authority of both white and black men. In response to the Moynihan Report in 1965, many African Americans began seriously to reject claims about the weakness of African American family life, offering the strength and creativity embodied in adaptable family definitions.

A primary argument of this volume is that the civil rights–era debates over defining family life and family problems are crucial to understanding the South since the 1960s: thinking through the meanings and limitations of Christian brotherhood, arguing about parental rights, sexuality, and schools, fighting about the meaning and significance of the Moynihan Report and the assumptions behind it, and taking new pride as black brothers and sisters set the stage for the South of the 1970s and 1980s. Questions of family crisis were almost everywhere, but the civil rights era encouraged serious debates about which families were in crisis and why.

Chapters 5 and 6 analyze ideas about family crisis in the South of the 1970s and 1980s. First, the South changed