The National Urban League and the Fight for US Adoption Reform

Abstract

The National Urban League initiated its Foster Care and Adoption Project in 1953 to increase African Americans’ participation in formal adoptions. League officials encouraged reforms in US policies and practices to eliminate the economic and social obatacles that limited African Americans’ adoptions. League officials also promoted greater integration of adoption agencies’ administrative and social work staff to advance the organization’s goals of encouraging interracial cooperation in social service agencies. The outcomes of the national project were inconsistent, in part because of resistance from some white child welfare professionals and the organized efforts of white citizens’ councils to defraud and defund many League branches. The project did highlight the social and institutional barriers that affected African Americans’ domestic and transnational adoptions. This chapter foregrounds the challenges adoption agencies faced when they endeavoured to placed Korean black children with African American families. It reveals why many successful agencies had to implement, on a case-by-case basis, many of the reforms that the League had hoped would produce national, comprehensive adoption reform.