Social Origins and Early Features of the Scientific Study of Black American Families and Children

The 1980s will be a period for new possibilities—a fitting optimism in an introduction to scholarly studies of black families and children undertaken by black scholars educated in the 1970s. This introductory paper focuses on a tradition that these studies have reexamined and replaced where necessary. Here the concern is with two issues: a description of social science as practiced by the early Chicago School of the University of Chicago, and a critique of how this perspective was applied to the black American experience in general.