Marriage and African Americans

 chart 1

  • In 2000, of all Americans age 15 and older 113 million (52.8%) were married and living with their spouses, while 19.8 million (or 9.3%) were divorced.

  • Since 1950, there has been a substantial decrease in the marriage rates and an increase in the divorce rates of both African American and white women. The trends have been most pronounced among African Americans. The percentage of African American women who are married declined from 62% to 36.1% between 1950 and 2000. Among white women, the corresponding decline was from 66% to 57.4%. Trends in divorce have shown less difference between races, rising from 3% to 11.7% among blacks and from 2% to 10.2% among whites.

  • Between 1950 and 2000, the percentage of never-married black women doubled, from 20.7% to 42.4%. Some of these women may never marry. However, American women on the whole are also likely to delay marriage and childbirth to attend college and establish careers. In 2000, 73% of all American women in their early 20's had never married, compared with only 36% in 1970, while about 53.7% of black men and women between the ages of 25 and 34 had never been married in 2000. The median age which people first married grew considerably for the total population between 1980 and 2000, from age 25 to 26.8 for men and from 22 to 25.1 for women.
    chart 2

  • The percentage of black men age 15 and older who are married dropped from 64% in 1950 to 42.8% in 2000. The decline for white men was much smaller, dropping from 70.2% to 60%. However, divorce rates during this long period were similar for both races; they rose from 2% to 9.5% for black men and from 2.1% to 8.3% for white men.

  • Between 1980 and 2000, the percentage of young black adults age 15 and older who have never married rose substantially, from 28.5% to 44.9%.

  • In the 1980's and 1990's, men ages 25 to 29 were about four times as likely to marry for the first time as men age 40 to 44, and eight times as likely to marry as men ages 50 to 54. In 1990, black men (75.8 marriages per thousand) were much less likely than white men (119.2 per thousand) to marry for the first time between ages 25 and 29, but were somewhat more likely to marry between ages 40 and 44 (31.9 for black men compared to 29.7 for white men) and after age 45. The marriage rates for previously divorced men and women consistently declined with additional age.

  • The median age of first marriage is slightly higher for men (26.8 years) than for women (25.1).

chart 3

Interracial Marriages

  • In 1960 there were about 150,000 interracial married couples(1) in the United States. This number grew rapidly to more than 1.0 million in 1998. In 2000, they numbered 1.46 million.

  • Black/white interracial married couples have increased seven-fold since 1960, from 51,000 to 363,000 in 2000. As a percentage of all married couples, this type more than tripled during the period. However, black/white marriages, which represented 34% of all interracial marriages (40,491) in 1960, fell to 24.7% of all interracial marriages (1,464,000) in 2000. About 70% of Hispanics also marry outside their group.

  • Non-Hispanic blacks and non-Hispanic whites are proportionately least likely to marry outside their groups, and whites who do so are almost three times more likely to marry Asians and American Indians than to marry blacks. Over 93% of whites and blacks marry within their racial groups, in contrast to about 70% of Asians, and less than one-third of American Indians. When minorities marry outside their group, their spouses are usually white.

Notes

1. Interracial married couples refer to marriages in which one spouse reported as white, black, American Indian, Alaskan Native or Asian/Pacific Islander and the other spouse belongs to another of these groups.

 

References

Clarke, Sally C. Advance Report of Final Marriage Statistics, 1989-1990. Volume 43 no.12, supplement. United States Department of Health and Human Services, 1995.

Harrison, R.J, and Claudette Bennett. Racial and Ethnic Diversity. State of the Union: America in the 1990s. Volume Two: Social Trends. New York: Russell Sage, 1995.

Lugaila, Terry A. Marital Status and Living Arrangements: (Update) (P20-514). United States Census Bureau, 1998. http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/ms-la.html

United States Census Bureau. Marital Status and Living Arrangements: (Update) (P20-514). http://www.census.gov/prod/99pubs/p20-514u.pdf 1998

United States Census Bureau. We the Americans: Blacks. 1993. http://www.census.gov/apsd/wepeople/we-1.pdf

 

Prepared by Cassandra Cantave and Roderick Harrison for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. October 2001.