When the Village Disappeared: The Death of Black Communal Parenting

We invoke it constantly, this village, as if the word itself were an incantation that could summon back into existence the thing it names. It takes a village to raise a child, we say, nodding with the comfortable certainty of people reciting a truth they no longer practice. We print it on T-shirts and cross-stitch it onto pillows and quote it in graduation speeches, and meanwhile the village is gone — dismantled not by a single catastrophe but by a century of migrations, policies, economic transformations, and cultural shifts that, taken together, have left Black children more isolated from the network of communal care than at any point in the four-hundred-year history of Black life on this continent. The village did not die of natural causes. It was killed, piece by piece, by forces that are identifiable, documentable, and, in many cases, reversible — if we possess the honesty to name them and the will to undo what they have done.

What the Village Was

Carol Stack, the anthropologist whose fieldwork in a Midwestern Black community in the late 1960s produced one of the most important studies of Black family life ever written, described a system of mutual aid so sophisticated, so intricate in its reciprocities, that it constituted what she called a domestic network — a web of kin and quasi-kin relationships that extended far beyond the nuclear family and provided the material, emotional, and supervisory resources that no single household could generate on its own. In the community she studied, children moved fluidly between households. Meals were shared across families. Childcare was distributed among grandmothers, aunts, older cousins, and neighbors. Money, clothing, furniture, and food circulated through networks of exchange that operated on the principle of generalized reciprocity: you gave when you could, you received when you needed, and the ledger was kept not in a book but in the shared understanding that survival was a collective enterprise.

This was not poverty making a virtue of necessity, though necessity certainly shaped the form. It was the American expression of a kinship system with deep roots in West African social organization, where the concept of the isolated nuclear family — two parents and their biological children, self-sufficient behind a closed door — did not exist and would have been considered bizarre. The extended family was the unit of survival. The community was the unit of child-rearing. The idea that a mother and father alone were supposed to provide everything a child needed — supervision, education, discipline, emotional support, economic resources, cultural transmission, and moral formation — was a peculiarly European invention, and it was one that Black Americans, for most of their history, had the good sense not to adopt.

Andrew Billingsley, whose research on the Black family remains foundational, documented that as late as the 1960s, extended family households were significantly more common among Black Americans than among whites. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, and non-related adults were regularly present in Black homes, not as guests but as integral members of the child-rearing apparatus. A child who misbehaved could expect correction from any adult in the community, not because those adults had been granted formal authority but because the community operated on the assumption that all its children were everybody’s responsibility.

“I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am, also, much more than that. So are we all.”
— James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, 1955

The Great Migration’s Hidden Cost

Between 1910 and 1970, approximately six million Black Americans left the rural South for the cities of the North, Midwest, and West. This movement — the Great Migration — is rightly celebrated as an act of collective self-liberation, a repudiation of Jim Crow achieved not through legislation but through the simple, radical act of leaving. But every act of liberation exacts a price, and the price of the Great Migration, paid not at the moment of departure but across the decades that followed, was the severing of the kinship networks that had sustained Black family life for generations.

When a young couple left Greenwood, Mississippi, for Chicago, or Macon, Georgia, for Detroit, they left behind more than geography. They left behind the grandmother who would have watched their children while they worked. They left behind the aunt who would have fed those children when money was short. They left behind the network of neighbors and church members who would have supervised those children after school, corrected their behavior in the street, and reported their activities to their parents with the unquestioned authority that the village conferred. What arrived in Chicago or Detroit was not a family embedded in a community. It was a nuclear unit — often a single parent — stripped of its support system and deposited in an environment that offered wages but nothing to replace what had been left behind.

William Julius Wilson documented what happened next. In the industrial cities of the North, Black families initially recreated approximations of the village: entire apartment buildings would be populated by migrants from the same Southern town, and the domestic networks that Stack would later describe were transplanted, in modified form, to the urban environment. But these reconstructed villages were fragile. They depended on geographic stability — on families staying in the same neighborhood long enough for trust to accumulate and reciprocity to function — and the forces of urban America conspired against that stability at every turn.

The Policy That Dismantled the Home

Of all the forces that destroyed the village, none was more surgically precise in its effect than welfare policy. The Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, as administered from the 1940s through the 1990s, contained a provision that was known colloquially as the man-in-the-house rule. Under this rule, a woman receiving AFDC benefits would lose those benefits if an able-bodied man was found to be residing in her household. Social workers — and in some jurisdictions, investigators who conducted unannounced midnight raids — were dispatched to verify that no man was present. A man’s shoes by the door, a man’s coat in the closet, a man’s razor in the bathroom could be sufficient grounds for termination of benefits.

The Supreme Court struck down the man-in-the-house rule in King v. Smith (1968), but by that time its damage had been done across two decades of enforcement, and its shadow persisted long after its formal demise. The rule had taught an entire generation of Black families that the presence of a man — any man, including the father of the children, including a grandfather, including an uncle who might otherwise have been part of the domestic network — was a financial liability. It incentivized not merely the absence of fathers but the absence of the entire male kinship network that had been integral to the village. The grandmother could stay. The aunt could stay. But the grandfather, the uncle, the male cousin — any of them could trigger the loss of the benefits on which the family’s survival depended.

The Neighborhood That Stopped Being a Community

Wilson documented a second, equally devastating force: the departure of the Black middle class from the neighborhoods that had, for decades, been integrated by class even as they were segregated by race. Before the fair housing legislation of the 1960s, Black professionals — doctors, lawyers, teachers, ministers — lived in the same neighborhoods as Black factory workers, domestic servants, and the unemployed, because they had no choice. Segregation, for all its evils, had produced communities in which the full range of Black social life was compressed into a single geography. The doctor’s children played with the janitor’s children. The teacher lived on the same block as the unemployed man and knew his children by name. The minister’s authority extended beyond his congregation to encompass any child he encountered on the street.

When fair housing laws made it possible for middle-class Black families to leave these neighborhoods, they did — rationally, understandably, for better schools and safer streets and the accumulated advantages that residential choice provides. But their departure removed from the remaining community the institutional anchors that had sustained the village: the stable families that modeled functional adulthood, the professionals who staffed the local institutions, the homeowners whose property maintenance set the visual standard for the block, the parents whose expectations for their children raised the expectations for everyone’s children. What remained was a neighborhood stripped of its internal diversity, its institutional capacity, and its ability to function as a village.

The physical infrastructure followed the social infrastructure into decline. The corner store where the owner knew every child’s name was replaced by a chain outlet staffed by strangers. The barbershop that had functioned as an informal counseling center closed or relocated. The church that had anchored the block saw its membership disperse across the metro area. The school that had been embedded in the community became a institution staffed by people who commuted in from elsewhere and left at three o’clock. The neighborhood ceased to be a community — a place where people knew each other, watched each other’s children, and held each other accountable — and became merely an address, a collection of households sharing a zip code but not a life.

The Digital Isolation

There is a contemporary dimension to this dissolution that is rarely discussed but cannot be ignored. The social media revolution, which was supposed to connect people, has in practice accelerated the atomization of community life. The front porch — where neighbors gathered, where children played under communal supervision, where information circulated and social norms were reinforced through daily contact — has been replaced by the screen. The screen connects you to people who share your interests but not your geography. It provides entertainment but not supervision. It creates the illusion of community without requiring any of the obligations that actual community demands: showing up, being present, watching someone else’s child, feeding someone else’s kid, correcting someone else’s teenager, attending someone else’s funeral.

For Black children, the consequences are acute. The communal surveillance that once kept children safe — the understanding that any adult on the block had the authority and the obligation to intervene when a child was in danger or headed for trouble — has been replaced by a void. Children navigate the hours between school and their parent’s return from work without the net that the village once provided. The results are visible in every statistic on juvenile crime, teen pregnancy, and accidental injury that peaks during the unsupervised after-school hours.

Building the Village Again

The question that confronts Black America now is not whether the village can be restored to its historical form — it cannot, because the conditions that produced it no longer exist — but whether the functions it performed can be replicated in structures suited to the twenty-first century. The evidence suggests they can, and in scattered locations across the country, they already are.

Intentional neighboring movements, such as those documented by researchers at the Asset-Based Community Development Institute at Northwestern University, are creating deliberate networks of mutual aid in urban neighborhoods. These are not nostalgia projects. They are structured programs that recruit residents on the same block to commit to specific, measurable acts of communal responsibility: watching each other’s children, sharing meals, maintaining shared spaces, and meeting regularly to address collective concerns. The research shows that these intentional networks produce measurable improvements in child outcomes, neighborhood safety, and social cohesion.

Extended learning programs that embed children in community-based organizations during the after-school hours are filling the supervisory gap that the village once covered. Programs like the Harlem Children’s Zone, which provides comprehensive support from birth through college for children in a specific geographic area, have demonstrated that when you reconstruct the functions of the village — supervision, mentorship, academic support, health care, and consistent adult presence — you can produce outcomes that match or exceed those of children raised in far more affluent circumstances.

Co-housing and intentional community models are attracting growing interest among Black families seeking to recreate the physical proximity that village life requires. These developments are designed to facilitate the kind of daily, unplanned interaction that community depends on: shared courtyards where children play under communal supervision, common kitchens where meals can be prepared collectively, and architectural designs that prioritize encounter over isolation. They are, in a sense, an attempt to engineer the conditions that the old neighborhoods produced organically — and the early evidence suggests they work.

The village disappeared because it was dismantled by forces that were larger than any individual family and beyond any individual family’s control. It will not reappear through individual effort or individual virtue. It will be rebuilt, if it is rebuilt at all, by communities that choose to make the obligations of village life explicit, structured, and sustained — communities that recognize that no parent was ever meant to raise a child alone, that the nuclear family was always an insufficient unit for the work of child-rearing, and that the village was not a metaphor but a technology, the most sophisticated social technology Black America ever developed, and one that must be reinvented for a world that has done everything in its power to make it obsolete.

“For these are all Black children. We will all profit by, or pay for, whatever they become.”
— James Baldwin, A Talk to Teachers, 1963