It appears that people's lives and environments are being transformed throughout the world. An astute observer of Black family life once challenged a group of helping professions to stop saving the Black families. It has become the common language of the day. But the struggle is over how people truly convince themselves to stop trying to save Black families, as well as to convince many Black families that they do not need to be saved. Scholars of Black family life have identified several African family patterns that with some variation have survived the slavery holocaust. In the early 1980s the University of Michigan completed the first nationally representative sample of Black adults. The study provided data on the feelings, attitudes, and behaviors of 2,107 adult respondents on all aspects of the Black experience.