In 1966, a white couple was furious when they learned that they couldn't adopt an African American child. Then they met a woman who changed their lives — and challenged the status quo.
Frank and Kara Speltz hold their adopted son at his christening in 1966. By Diane Bernard Diane Bernard Editor and writer for Retropolis Email Bio March 10 at 7:00 AM After Frank and Kara Speltz got married in 1965, the couple found out they couldn’t have children.
In interviews, they both said they understood the official resistance and social pressures they would face if they adopted a black baby. After the city rejected their interracial adoption request, a man came into St. Stephen’s with a problem. He said he had a white friend who was pregnant by a black man. The woman felt she was too young and inexperienced to care for the child by herself, and she wanted to put the baby up for adoption. Could the church help them find a home for the baby?
In segregated, post-World War II America, children of color and mixed-race children were considered “hard to place” in adoption agency parlance. Most agencies at the time used a policy of “matching,” which required that children be placed with families who looked like them or came from the same racial, religious or ethnic backgrounds, according to Matine T. Spence, professor of history at the University of Iowa.
The adopted son of Frank and Kara Speltz in 1966. Yet few states explicitly banned interracial adoption: “It was thought to be beyond discussion — it was so obviously wrong that there was no need for a law,” Kennedy told the magazine. Although the city’s Department of Public Welfare requested basic information on the race of the birthparents and the child, Dowdey’s strategy was to mention race as little as possible in the filing documents. In addition, Frank Speltz had researched an adoption case from the turn of the century in which a black woman adopted a white abandoned child. Maybe that case could help sway the judges?
The Speltzes never discussed race with the social workers, and it helped that the baby was light-skinned. But they still worried that the adoption would be turned down. That year, there were 4,336 black children placed for adoption in the United States, with 1,447 of them placed with white families. In 1971, 7,420 African American children were adopted, with 2,574 placed with white families.In 1972, the National Association of Black Social Workers asserted that such arrangements constituted a form of “cultural genocide.”
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