By now, we’re all aware that Black women have the lowest marriage rates in the U.S. In my last essay, Why Dating Feels Hard for Black Women: A Data-Driven Look at Love and Marriage, I did a deep dive into marriage trends tied to income and employment of people of different races, focusing on Black women, using data from 2019 to 2023. I kept getting the same question from readers: are marriage rates better or worse for Black women now than they were in the past? 

There seems to be this notion of a golden age for Black folks (some readers pointed to the 1950s), when the Black family was strong. Black men married Black women, children had two parents in the home, and the value system was healthier and more community-oriented. My gut was telling me that yes, Black people probably had higher marriage rates in the past. But I wanted to get a stronger view of the story. Did this golden age of marriage actually exist? If so, when did it shift and why? I decided to go to the data to get some insight.

The Story of a Black Family

My mom used to tell me stories about how she and my auntie would go down to Mississippi some summers and visit Big Ma, the matriarch who had raised their own mother. Her stories were vibrant and yet shrouded in mystery. 

Small country town, older Christian ladies with strict rules and a deep sense of respectability. Neighbors who disciplined their neighbors’ kids. Sweltering heat, wide open fields with cotton blooming, catching lightning bugs and pulling the backs off to use as earrings. Soulful songs at a one room Black Church on Sundays. 

And on the other hand, no context for any of it. No knowledge of Big Ma’s real name, or who her people were. A picture of a white man hanging on the wall that was never spoken of – who was he? No sense of what Big Ma’s early life was like, had she worked, had she loved? 

I think about these stories because I’m thinking about what was going on in my family in this alleged golden age of Black romantic unions. I don’t know much, but here is what I do know. Big Ma is my great great grandmother. She was born in Mississippi in 1917 and married to an older man in 1930 at the age of 13. Two years later, she had her first and only child, Maudine. At the age of 13, out of wedlock, Maudine had her first child, my grandmother. That was 1945. 

She would go on to have four children by four different men in the next 5-7 years. She never married. The story has it that the mysterious white man whose picture was hanging on Big Ma’s wall was her father. Big Ma was fair-skinned and had long hair. She apparently passed these traits on to Maudine. Maudine was a rebellious child, and because of her looks, she was popular with the men. She abandoned her four kids, headed to Chicago to lead a fast life, leaving Big Ma to raise them.

My grandmother met my grandfather in a Mississippi jail after being arrested for protesting at a civil rights march somewhere between 1962 and 1964. They hit it off, got married, and moved to Chicago. They had their first child, my auntie, in 1965. My mom was born two years later, but my grandfather left my grandmother before she was born. They never got back together, but they never divorced. 

My grandfather would tell my mom that in the early years of being in Chicago, life was good. It was easy to get a job, and easy to move up. He made good money. But he started selling drugs in the 70’s when that changed. My grandmother struggled to raise her two daughters alone in Chicago – sometimes sending them down South for summers with Big Ma.

Time to Unpack

Looking at data for the percent of people aged 35 and over who never married from 1890-2010, we see that before 1970 Black women had the lowest never-married rates in the U.S. These rates converged with those of white Americans in 1970, and sky-rocketed thereafter. So yes, it is true that marriage rates for Black women were better in the past, and indeed even better than whites.

Marriage Without Agency

But, I think there’s some things worth considering, especially given some context from my family’s story. My great great grandmother got married in 1930 at the age of thirteen. Thirteen. That’s insane to think about. But it was pretty normal. It signals a lack of agency on the part of women/girls during that time. The chart below shows that the median marriage age for Black women in 1930 was 21.

We see a consistent gap in never-married rates between Black men and women of about 3-4% before 1960. I think this could also speak to older men marrying young girls, which lines up with my Big Ma’s story. Again signaling a lack of agency. We aren’t talking about romantic love and partnership here. It’s not a far leap to think that what we’re seeing is men entering into contracts for a girl to keep house and take care of his needs. 

Yes, the marriage rates were better, but perhaps the situation was not. When you take into account the deep religiosity and respectability politics of the Black community in the South in those early years (most Black people lived in the South before the Great Migration), it’s not hard to imagine that Black women would have marriage rates even higher than their white counterparts.

It’s worth noting that white men and women also have this gap in never-married rates. They closed it in 1950. At this time the median marriage age for both white and Black women began to steadily increase. At that time, many states set the legal marriageable age without parental consent to 18 for women. But I also think this signals that before this time women just had fewer options or even choice in how to move in the world. Marriage is just what you did, and you did it early.

A Changing Landscape

We know that marriage rates have dropped for Americans in general since about 1980. But for Black Americans, that trend has been creeping up since 1950 and explosive since 1970. I don’t think we can point to any one thing as the cause for this. Many factors collided during this time. Here are some I think we should take deep consideration of.

• Civil Rights Movement and The Great Migration (1960s): as people moved around and gained more opportunities an effect could be the disruption of marriage patterns and family formation
• Changing gender norms (1960s-70s): expanded rights for women, more acceptance of cohabitation, and divorce all influenced expectations around marriage
• Deindustrialization and changing job market (1970s): as steady paying manufacturing jobs moved out of cities, Black men were very likely hit hardest. This economic destabilization very likely influenced the propensity to marry
• Rising Incarceration (1970s-1980s): heavy policing of Black bodies, the influx of and subsequent war on drugs, all make for a shrinking pool of eligible Black men for marriage

These factors are in line with the decades in which we see that Black women had the biggest declines in marriage rates – between 1960s-70s, and especially 1970-1980. 

And it’s amazing to me how these larger events are written heavily into my own family history. My family’s move to Chicago (Civil Rights and Great Migration), my grandfather’s era of prosperity and then swift downturn (deindustrialization), and his subsequent venture into selling drugs (rising incarceration).

Golden Age of Black Union? Nostalgia is Easy

From the data dating back to 1890, it’s clear that Black women experienced marriage rates that were in line with and at times even higher than that of white America. But these data indicate some marriage trends that by today’s standard, would be troubling. It’s mostly illegal to consider fifteen year old girls as viable options for marriage today. And the fact that this was so common gives a nod to what marriage was back in the day. Certainly not necessarily the manifestation of choice, of love, and of partnership.

Still, this consideration of what marriage actually was and why that may have led to higher marriage rates does not explain why rates plummeted for Black women (and men). I think that when you begin to remove marriage as an obligatory thing that people did to survive and be respectable, you get to the root of marriage. And this goes beyond love. Marriage is largely about stability. It’s about putting down roots, building a home, a family, and working in partnership with someone you care for.

Taking into consideration the major events in the country from the 1960s through the 1980s, we see that Black Americans have faced one movement or policy after another that inevitably led to or was grounded in instability. These events destabilized communities, changed gender norms, criminalized and carted away Black men, and rocked the foundations of economic opportunity for budding Black communities.

It is a key idea that marriage rates are strongly tied to economic stability. Many studies find that when economic stability improves, marriage rates among Black Americans tend to rise. This is in line with my previous essay that showed that high-earning Black women today have higher marriage rates than those who earn lower wages. It’s also in line with my hypothesis that because Black women have had to play an economic role that is often an antithesis to societal norms, it has made it harder for them to find partnership.

If marriage is a hallmark of stability, how can we expect marriage rates for Black people to be in step with the norm, when this community has been hit with one destabilizing force after another? It is nice to have an idolized idea about when Big Ma was coming up. She got married and raised her children in a strong, stable, two-parent home. She stayed with her husband until death do us part. But, it’s largely a nostalgic fantasy for “the good old days”. Big Ma was probably a child when she married. And she did the best she could under the social, religious, and economic constraints that she had.

It’s encouraging to note that the rate of decline of marriage in the past two decades has slowed a great deal, being even less than that of white women between 2010 and 2020. Marriage today means something very different than it meant at the turn of the 20th century and even in the 1950s. When we look at the numbers in the future, we’ll know that they represent something more akin to what we in this era believe it should — connection, love, partnership, choice. Yes, dating and partnership is hard for Black women. But it only serves us to look forward as we continue to navigate the historical societal challenges that make it so, and the evolving cultural expectations of what marriage should be.

Sources

https://www.census.gov/library/working-papers/2012/demo/SEHSD-WP2012-12.html Historical Marriage Trends from 1890-2010: A Focus on Race Differences. 2012. Diana B. Elliott, Kristy Krivickas, Matthew W. Brault, and Rose M. Kreider. 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HxupbE45la05aEVWwG0GXhrVp0qErQ7f/edit?gid=1258060644#gid=1258060644 Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Decennial Censuses, 1950 to 1990, and Current Population Survey, March and Annual Social and Economic Supplements, 1993 to 2025.