The increasing percentage of Black babies born into single-parent households was not due to single Black mothers having more children but to married Black women having fewer children over the course of the twentieth century. Ma could see that decline in her family. Ma’s married paternal grandmother had sixteen children in the 1910s and 1920s. Ma’s married mother had six children in the 1940s and 1950s. My mother had two children in the early 1980s—as did two of her three married sisters.
