Hurtin’ Words: Debating Family Problems in the Twentieth-Century South by Ted Ownby (review)

Ted Ownby’s Hurtin’ Words: Debating Family Problems in the Twentieth-Century South examines contested ideas about family among black and white southerners. Ownby argues that in the twentieth-century South, it was common to identify problems in groups of people, and very often, those problems were bound up in ideas about family. Ownby is not the first historian to grapple with black or white families, but his study stands out by weaving these stories together and for its consideration of how residents of the South produced shifting ideas about family and family life. Ownby contends that viewing twentieth-century southern history “through a lens of family problems” reframes ideas about race, gender, religion, civil rights, and government policies (p. 4). Ownby casts a wide net for his sources, drawing on everything from music, television, photography, and literature to court records, social scientific studies, and autobiographies, which makes for a very rich contribution to cultural history.

By examining the long twentieth century, Ownby illuminates the changing ideas and debates about southern families. At the beginning of the book, he addresses the different assumptions about families based on racial identities; black families were thought to be inherently dysfunctional, which justified racial segregation, while white families were construed as stable and permanent. These racial constructions about family life had insidious consequences, resulting in violence and inequality for African Americans and an aversion to divorce for white southerners.

One of the strengths of the book is its nuanced discussion of brotherhood. Ownby chronicles how churches and black civil rights organizations nurtured a language of brotherhood, evoking this concept in their claims for racial equality and inclusion. But, as he argues, this quest for universal brotherhood was met with backlash as the white architects of massive resistance offered a counternarrative of brotherhood, suggesting that racial integration would lead to friendships among black and white children and to interracial marriage. By the late 1960s, the changes of the decade—including pessimism about progress in civil rights, the rise of the Black Power movement, the emergence of a new feminist movement, and, especially, the release of the Moynihan Report (1965)—prompted black activists to reject the rhetoric of interracial brotherhood and reconstruct family as a broad racial unit that was composed of black sisters and brothers. Similarly, by the 1970s, the white South—once thought to be the bastion of solid marriages—witnessed the rise of divorce and rebellious white youth culture, which prompted some white southerners to cling to traditional definitions of white family life. The last chapter examines four distinct moments in the South—the rise of Black Family Reunions, the release of the landmark documentary series Roots (1977), the publication of black and white memoirs, and the start of Habitat for Humanity. Ownby argues that these discrete episodes produced more flexible and expansive views of family that celebrated culture and the unique configurations of southern men, women, and children.

Ownby should be commended for juxtaposing black and white experiences in the South. However, the concept of family is not always clearly defined, and the book, at times, needs tighter organization. Though in the afterword he discusses the current crisis of separating Latin American children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border, Ownby could have written a more multiracial history of family problems in the South, one that also discusses Asian and Latino residents. Despite these criticisms, Ownby has produced a deeply researched book that will be of interest to scholars of southern history, cultural history, African American history, and gender and sexuality.