Black Family Reunions: Finding the Rest of Me

By Dr. Ione D. Vargus

Dr. Ione Vargus has long been convinced of the value of family reunions, especially among black families. For quite a few years, she traveled around the country to visit various black family reunions to observe what families did. She interviewed various members of those families as well. The result is this book, which delves into the social and psychological benefits of having reunions, as well as some advice and guidance on the nuts and bolts of planning and holding a reunion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9781664121744

Dr. Ione D. Vargus

Dr. Ione Dugger Vargus is professor emerita of Temple University where she broke new ground as the first African American ever to hold the title of academic dean in Temple’s history. Dr. Vargus served as the dean of the School of Social Administration for thirteen years, then became Temple’s acting vice provost for undergraduate education and presidential fellow. It was a combination of her experience as a social worker in Chicago and Boston, as well as her academic work as a professor at the University of Illinois, along with her endeavors in Philadelphia that inspired her lifelong commitment to strengthening families and promoting reunions as a way to enhance identity, self-esteem, and family values. Guided by that calling, Dr. Vargus founded the Family Reunion Institute at Temple University in 1990. Since then, she has become a nationally acclaimed authority on reunions and their role in sustaining spiritual and cultural vitality in our families and communities. Dr. Vargus has been interviewed or quoted by nearly four hundred national and local publications and has appeared on a variety of radio, television, and online shows. For seventeen years, she and a skillful team of volunteers produced a national conference on family reunions, drawing hundreds of attendees from all over the country. It is no wonder that she is widely and affectionately known as the Mother of Family Reunions. Her Family Reunion Institute continues to advise and guide readers through its website www.familyreunioninstitute.net.

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Copyright © 2020 by Dr. Ione D. Vargus.

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Rev. date: 08/19/2020

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1   Ties That Bind

Chapter 2   Bringing the Family Together

Chapter 3   Family Activities: More than a Cookout

Chapter 4   Telling the Story

Chapter 5   Strengthening the Family: Family Empowerment

Chapter 6   Embrace Every Family: Recollections

Chapter 7   The Future of Family Reunions

Addendum

Endnotes

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am indebted to a number of people and especially the families who either invited me to their reunion, from which I received their information first hand, or who shared their material. The book would be much longer if I included everyone I visited, but I hope the book will encourage families to compile their own history. The African American Genealogy Group has become outstanding, as families have shared information about how to go about collecting their family history. The esteemed Blockson collection at Temple University in Philadelphia is kind enough to keep family reunion programs so that family members in years to come can have a source of information.

My deep interest in African American family reunions was encouraged by a small group of people. They were Dr. Ernestine Adams, Dr. Vernon Herron, Ms. Jacqueline Taylor, and Mrs. Helen Wilkerson. Two of the early members, John Logan and Marilyn Alston, are now deceased. I will never forget how we met once a month or more for a meeting at Temple University for which I usually cooked a small meal. I was dubbed the Mother of Family Reunions in 1990 by Claude Lewis, an editorial writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

I am indebted to my uncle, Mabray Kountze, who not only was ahead of his time but who, as early as 1920, was documenting our family roots. He also wrote a book documenting many of the families of people living in my hometown of Medford, Massachusetts, entitled This Is Your Heritage.

I am also indebted to Beverly Harper of Portfolio Associates. Her company published such beautiful announcements of the forthcoming conferences that the Family Reunion Institute held for seventeen years, which attracted people from all over the country. I was lucky enough that one of her workers, Sylvia Ford-George, became a volunteer board member of the institute and has served for over fifteen years, writing and editing our website, familyreunioninstitute.net.

Sylvia and fellow board member, Doug Harris, also helped me write the final chapter of this book. Thank you.

In addition to the many families whom I count as friends, I must include two other people: one is Edith Wagner and the other is Dean Miller. For many years, Edith produced a beautifully colored magazine with related information for all kinds of reunions entitled Reunions Magazine. Dean held an annual half-day family reunion conference for several years for people in the Virginia and Washington area. I was usually invited to speak at Dean’s conference.

Finally, I must express my deep love to my two children, Suzanne Holloman and Billy Vargus, and my granddaughter, Nia (who recently received honors in creative writing from college), for their willingness to help me in any way they could. (I also have two other very smart granddaughters, Jasminn and Stephanie Holloman.)

CHAPTER 1

Ties That Bind

The future of our House depends on how we prepare for it today. We

are a family with different names, colors, education, and incomes; but

what we have in common surpasses all the things that tend to divide

us. We have common blood and heritage; we have the spirit and

determination of our ancestors to meet any challenge. There is no limit

to what we can hope and achieve in our lifetime on this planet.

—The Family Visitor, newsletter of the House of Ogburn

Why the Reunion?

A major importance of the family reunion is that it brings together the extended family, not simply the immediate or nuclear family.

This year, thousands of African Americans will pile into cars, file onto trains, hop on planes, or climb on buses and travel hundreds, or even thousands, of miles to attend their family reunion. They will gather for a weekend at a hotel or other accommodation. Why do they come together?

"Maybe it can help us learn who we are and how we can help ourselves better," says Reverend Albert Gaither. Gaither is one of many people I spoke with at the family reunions I attended in my search to discover why reunions are becoming such a popular phenomenon that it has the characteristics of a movement. As a pastor, he says he is a lover of people. He continues:

You get to know your family. Many times you don’t get to see family members and members of the family that we met since the reunion started we didn’t even know we had. It’s such a joy and inspiration to me to meet my family members. It thrills me to death. I just don’t get enough, and I’m always there with bells on.¹

Robert James comes to the Gaither-James family reunion to see some of our unknown relatives—and to get together. Mr. James was born and raised in Camden, South Carolina, where the reunion was being held. He moved to New York in 1938.

I just am grateful to be around all of my relatives and unknown relatives. I just feel free. I look forward to this every year, and it’s the biggest thing that I prepare for. I wouldn’t take vacation any other time unless it’s around the family reunion time.²

Warren Gaither says, From the very young to the very old, they come from far and wide. The reunion gives them a chance to get together and feed one another, both physically and emotionally.³

The Extended Family Concept

Although Africa is a vast and diverse continent, one similarity at the center of the African tradition was the family, which was also the religious, economic, and political unit with a wide circle of extended kinship. Edward Sims Jr. writes,

No one had to be without father or mother as long as there was a tribe. Every person in the tribe had a responsibility which added to the life and strength of the tribe. There were the hunters, fishermen, farmers, craftsmen, herdsmen, and builders. Each person recognized that the quality of life of the tribe was predicated on how well he or she performed their assigned tasks.⁴

For most black people, slavery disrupted this essential role of families because it allowed no legal marriage, no legal family, and no legal control over children. Early Black people began an adaptation of family in this country. The extended kinship concept continued as slave adults took care of children who might not even be of their own flesh and blood. The black slave family may not have had legal status, but Billingsley cites the number of studies that show that even during slavery, organized black family life survived and was a prominent feature of life in the black community.⁵ Gutman reveals that visits between kin with separate owners—and especially husbands and fathers separated from their wives and children—regularly dot the historical record documenting slave behavior.⁶

At the first opportunity after slavery, Black people reconstituted a legal family structure and roles. The extended family remained crucial. One very elderly interviewee said,

We all came up North together … stuck together all through life. Sent for our parents, brothers, and sisters and brought them all up north. I guess we had a house full of relatives in those days.

Aunts, uncles, grandparents, and unrelated neighbors considered part of the family gave moral, psychological, and financial support. Raising others’ children became a natural phenomenon in African American life. When families had to separate due to hardship and financial problems, the children were often scattered among other relatives and close friends. Even today, this practice continues in parts of Africa. Ryan Ruggiero, who spent time volunteering in a small village outside of Tanzania, reported,

This tight-knit community in Rau village was incredible. It was near impossible to tell where one family ended and another began … To see the community come together to care for one another’s children as if they were their own was amazing.⁷

Caring for others within the family structure and community was not only a value carried over from the African legacy but also a reaction to discrimination and the fact that many social and human services were not offered to the black community.

In a typical Black community outside of the large urban centers, a real community feeling existed, a kind of extended family–kinship feeling that absorbed newcomers, a group solidarity, a strong racial consciousness, and a lack of class distinctions. In neighborhoods, people could walk to see one another. When neighbors and relatives told a child to do something, their instructions were followed. No back talk.

In a broadcast interview discussing his memoir entitled Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, Cornel West describes his neighborhood.

Oh, that neighborhood—Glen Elder, Sacramento. We had such deep ties of sympathy and bonds of empathy, taking care of each other. Mom ran out of sugar, I’d go to Mrs. Durham and Mrs. Reed or Mrs. Stuckey’s house, get the sugar. Same would be true if they ran out. When Mom and Dad were working, we were babysat by the whole block, you know.⁸

Valora Washington, an activist, gives further testimony to the extended family concept.

My grandparents and many of the people I knew were part of the great migration from the South. They and their friends all moved from the same small town up north to Columbus, and the experience bonded them as an extended family. Every Sunday, twenty-five to thirty-five people ate dinner at our house. That’s how tight our sense of community was. I grew up thinking of all these folks as aunts, uncles, and cousins. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I found out that some of them weren’t actually blood relations. And so many of them were hard-working people who acted out their values.⁹

Diane Reeves sings, everybody’s child belongs to the neighborhood. The song has significant meaning for me because, for several years, I was raised almost literally by people in the neighborhood in which I grew up. My father, Lt. Col. Edward Dugger, died during the Depression when I was eight years old. My mother, Madeline Dugger, refused to accept welfare or what was then called relief for her six children. After much difficulty, having been refused jobs because she was black or because she was a woman, she found a position at an army camp as a director of a service club for Black soldiers. But this job required her to live and work away from home. My older siblings had to rise very early to travel by train to college and then go to work after their classes. I was alone much of the time. I was supported greatly by others outside of my immediate family. I was urged to study, to sing, and to play the piano. I’ll never ever forget the neighbor who yelled at me because he thought I was out of my house too late after a community center event. In fact, I still believe that the community’s parents were harder on me than they were on their own children! This had a significant influence on my life.

The Decline of the Extended Family

Family structures in America, despite race and ethnicity, have changed in general. Among the changes is the diminishing of the extended family. The Black community has been greatly affected by this change, and everyone who experienced it expresses sadness that it has been lost. Speaker after speaker at African American events and conferences express this opinion no matter what the topic. The sentiment can also be heard on radio talk shows. People tell the stories of aunts, uncles, and others who nurtured them. They mention the offering of advice, the caring word, a loving smile, or even a reprimand. They talk about people who were family and carried familial titles but were not blood relatives. They refer to godparents and play cousins.

Often quoted is the African proverb that it takes a village to raise a child. People are exhorted to return to the value of a collective caring in the community and particularly toward children.

Many interviewees for this book talked about how much a particular relative or family friend meant to them. To a person, they mentioned how things used to be. They said, [If] neighbors and relatives told you to stop doing something, you followed their instructions. There was no back talk. Social control was readily dispensed, and instead of being seen as a negative, it was perceived as adults standing up and caring.

In an article entitled Times Were Tough, but Together, We Got By, Harry Alford suggests that we should get back to the old days. He says,

We had a wonderful upbringing. My brothers, hundreds of cousins, and friends in the little community of Oxnard, California, bonded together with the entire community and worked as a positive force. Though every race was represented, we each had a certain identity and all were part of the collective mass. It was one big family. … Statistically, we were poor but we didn’t know it… The harvest would be shared by all.¹⁰

The reasons for the loss of the extended family are many and complex and are beyond the scope of this book. Only a brief and simplistic recognition of factors follows. People became more mobile as factors such as war, economic growth, and urbanization helped disperse family members as they moved from home roots to other places. Over 15 million civilians, most of whom had never even traveled outside their home state, moved during WWII—over half of them to new states.¹¹ Government and institutions reduced social controls by assuming many functions once carried out primarily by the community and extended family. Values forged of a collective social consciousness changed to values with a more individualistic approach and focused on a narrower part of the family or just the nuclear or immediate family. Geographic mobility and social mobility, which were often a part of the march of progress, scattered relatives and invited a reduction in contact among family members.

In their book The Black Extended Family, Joanne and Elmer Martin detail many reasons for deterioration of the African American extended family.¹² They note the loss of kinship ties even when families live in the same city. They describe the impact of urbanization and government programs on extended family functions. Their analysis could also apply to many white families.

Case studies of people migrating from rural areas to urban areas, such as the book Sea Island to City, often chronicle diminishing ties.

There are several differences of far reaching importance between the home life in St. Helena and that experienced by migrants in the cities. When an Islander leaves his rural home in St. Helena and takes up residence in a city, he encounters situations which are well known to be conducive to family disintegration.… [there is] a smaller amount of social control exerted by urban households over the individual members. There is not the constant propinquity of members of the family that is characteristic of St. Helena.¹³

Disappearance of work at various times in the United States has affected the majority society in the same way that it affected African American families for years. This also played havoc with family relationships and raised the issue of how we structure family life. Thus, the decline of the extended family has culminated in a decline of community social interaction, close personal ties, social control, and psychological comfort.

Revival of Extended Family

Maintaining kinship bonds is one of the strongest African American characteristics, according to sociologists. Robert Hill (1997) captures the observations of many African American scholars when he writes, Undoubtedly, the most enduring cultural strength that black Americans brought with them from the African continent was the extended family and its strong kinship networks.¹⁴ In spite of all the reasons that kinship relationships have declined, Black people have come roaring back with another adaptation. Using all their leadership skills, many of which they have learned through the Black church, and their natural creativity, they are finding a way to connect with family. They are innately reaching back to their heritage and, in so doing, reviving the extended family. They are doing this by having family reunions.

These reunions are three-day or longer events when families gather, usually in hotels, and have a set program. The former one-day picnic has grown to a much larger event, which usually moves from location to location so that no one family has to do the work each year. There are an increasing variety of activities.

Benefits of Reunions

The most obvious benefit of a reunion is an introduction or renewal of family relationships. Not only distant relatives, but also brothers and sisters who may have been separated may come together for the first time. One person told the story of her first reunion at which all ten of her mother’s children had come together for the first time. Two of the children had been separated from the rest and, although raised by relatives, had never been with the rest of their siblings.

Far more than bringing family together, the reunion is becoming a tool for the Black family to impart knowledge, inspiration, and values for each member to take home. Madeline Dugger Kelley, matriarch of her family observed,

You meet people who have the same idea of spreading the things they have done well to other people in the family and to help each other. I think a reunion is very important because so much love is spread around, and everybody is so helpful. The reason that they are there is because they want to come and they want to help each other. That’s history, because the family starts with a clan and spreads out to the city, state, the community, and the nation.¹⁵

Madeline Kelley was an eighty-nine-year-old great-grandmother when she traveled more than five hundred miles to attend a reunion. She had