Before the 1960s, “Negro”
adoption referred to the permanent placement of African-American
children or mixed-race children who had one “Negro”
birth parent. Few people considered
transracial adoption a viable
option for these children, with important exceptions such as Pearl
S. Buck and Helen Doss, author of The
Family Nobody Wanted. When adoption services were extended
to children of color, they were strictly segregated and matching
mattered just as it did for their white counterparts. But these
children were placed in families so infrequently before 1945 that
“Negro” adoption was considered part of the revolution
inaugurating special needs adoptions
after World War II. Adoption resource exchanges that published
monthly listings of waiting children and families were first used
to find homes for “Negro” children. By the late 1960s,
these exchanges were widely used to place all “hard-to-place”
children.
For a good part of the twentieth century, African-American birth
parents and children were simply denied adoption services by
agencies because of their religion, race, or both. In some states
with large African-American populations, such as Florida and Louisiana,
not a single African-American child was placed for adoption by an
agency for many years running as late as the 1940s. Discriminated
against and reluctant to establish racially-exclusive organizations
when integration was synonymous with equality, African Americans
relied instead on traditions of informal adoption to take care of
their own.
By midcentury, estimates were that up to 50,000 African-American
children were in need of adoption, but would probably never find
permanent homes. The U.S. Children's
Bureau began including race in its reporting system in 1948
and during the 1950s, a number of innovative programs around the
country began recruiting non-white parents. From New York to Chicago
and Los Angeles to Washington, DC, child welfare professionals and
civil rights activists came together to promote culturally sensitive
policies, integrate agency staff, and do community outreach. “You
don't have to be a Joe Louis or a Jackie Robinson to adopt children,”
declared one encouraging radio spot created by the Citizens' Committee
on Negro Adoptions of Lake County, Indiana.
The National Urban League Foster Care and Adoptions Project, founded
in 1953, and Adopt-A-Child, founded in 1955, took big steps toward
promoting “Negro” adoption nationally. Adopt-a-Child
lasted for five years, received more than 4000 inquiries from around
the United States and the Caribbean, and facilitated the placement
of more than 800 children before running out of money. Most “Negro”
adoption programs were located in cities with significant African-American
and immigrant populations. In San Francisco, MARCH (Minority Adoption
Recruitment of Children's Homes) had a large caseload of “Spanish-American,”
Chinese, Filipino, Hawaiian, Japanese, Korean, Samoan, and American
Indian as well as “Negro” children. Some states with
overwhelmingly white populations also initiated projects: The Children's
Home Society of Minnesota launched PAMY (Parents to Adopt Minority
Youngsters) and the Boys and Girls Aid Society of Oregon sponsored
“Operation Brown Baby.”
These programs did not promote transracial
adoption, but they received numerous inquiries from white couples.
After years of hard work had not eradicated the racial bias that
made it difficult for African-American families to adopt, a few
agencies began to cautiously challenge race-matching by placing
African-American children in white homes. Parent-led organizations
such as the Open Door Society and the Council on Adoptable Children
also emerged during the 1960s to publicize the needs of waiting
children. Only tiny numbers of African-American children were ever
adopted by white parents, but these transracial
adoptions reached their peak around 1970, when perhaps 2,500
such adoptions took place. This trend followed other important developments,
especially Native American adoption (through the Indian
Adoption Project) and international
adoption, in which significant numbers of children from Asian
countries crossed lines of race as well as nation to become members
of American families.
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