The Racial Origins of Foster Home Care: Black Family Responsibility in the Early Welfare State, New York City, 1930s–1960s

Abstract

Black family values and behavior have long been at the center of policy solutions to intergenerational poverty. But in the early twentieth century, the Black family took on paradoxical significance as a solution to child poverty and neglect through the foster family. This was part of a broad realignment in child protection that upheld the “Home” as the best place for children—yet the concept came to mean something different for White and Black youth. Using New York City as a case by which to study broad transformations in child protection ideology and local child welfare response, I find that in the 1930s substitute care underwent a dramatic transformation with many White children cared for in their own homes or in therapeutic institutions, while previously excluded Black youth gained disproportionate access through race-matched foster families. Though a seemingly progressive approach, I argue that the prioritization of the foster home over the biological home illuminates how the family was envisioned as a solution to poverty in the context of racial inequality. Child welfare workers imagined that patterns of placement in race-matched foster families could be manipulated to overcome segregation and exclusion from the emerging welfare state. But as more non-White children entered substitute care, the conditions of poverty and distress in segregated communities necessitated a return to congregate care for “hard-to-place” minority youth as Black families seemingly failed to take care of their own. This case is important because it highlights the way in which official foster care systems emerged not as an extension of Black kinship care strategies, but as an experimental solution to dependency and neglect that mobilized the Black family to resolve the many consequences of state abandonment.