This book describes and documents the existence of the black helping tradition, and offers a theory regarding its origin, development, and decline. The book is based on research operating from the fundamental assumption that a pattern of black self-help activities developed from the black extended family, particularly the extended family's major elements of mutual aid, social-class cooperation, male-female equality, and prosocial behavior in children; and that the pattern of black self-help spread from the black extended family to institutions in the wider black community through fictive kinship and racial and religious consciousness.

The life and times of the thirty-second President who was reelected four times.

This volume focuses on the black family in the United States and the social forces and issues that affect it, including education, healthcare, racism, poverty, and politics. It examines the effects of these social forces on individuals as well as families. Contributions are varied. "A Biscuit for a Letter" examines education in the antebellum South. "Black Intellectuals on Trial" and "Africans' Perspectives on Race in the US" both analyse the role of race and racism in America. "Feminization of Poverty and the Black Family" illustrates the double burden of race and gender borne by black women. "It's Gotta Be Some Drama!" analyses the televised depiction of black colleges and universities. "African-centred Research Frameworks" studies the importance of cultural awareness in academia. "Work to Be Done" recounts the activism of black women in the Democratic Party. This volume offers an interdisciplinary approach to study of the black family in the United States, taking into account the forces of the larger society that influence it. The Black Family and Society is the most recent volume in Transaction's Africana Studies series.

This volume focuses on the black family in the United States and the social forces and issues that affect it, including education, healthcare, racism, poverty, and politics. It examines the effects of these social forces on individuals as well as families. Contributions are varied. “A Biscuit for a Letter” examines education in the antebellum South. “Black Intellectuals on Trial” and “Africans’ Perspectives on Race in the US” both analyze the role of race and racism in America. “Feminization of Poverty and the Black Family” illustrates the double burden of race and gender borne by black women. “It’s Gotta Be Some Drama!” analyzes the televised depiction of black colleges and universities. “African-centered Research Frameworks” studies the importance of cultural awareness in academia. “Work to Be Done” recounts the activism of black women in the Democratic Party. This volume offers an interdisciplinary approach to study of the black family in the United States, taking into account the forces of the larger society that influence it. The Black Family and Society is the most recent volume in Transaction’s Africana Studies series.

An exhaustively researched history of black families in America from the days of slavery until just after the Civil War.

Life in the old South has always fascinated Americans--whether in the mythical portrayals of the planter elite from fiction such as Gone With the Wind or in historical studies that look inside the slave cabin. Now Brenda E. Stevenson presents a reality far more gripping than popular legend, even as she challenges the conventional wisdom of academic historians. Life in Black and White provides a panoramic portrait of family and community life in and around Loudoun County, Virginia--weaving the fascinating personal stories of planters and slaves, of free blacks and poor-to-middling whites, into a powerful portrait of southern society from the mid-eighteenth century to the Civil War. Loudoun County and its vicinity encapsulated the full sweep of southern life. Here the region's most illustrious families--the Lees, Masons, Carters, Monroes, and Peytons--helped forge southern traditions and attitudes that became characteristic of the entire region while mingling with yeoman farmers of German, Scotch-Irish, and Irish descent, and free black families who lived alongside abolitionist Quakers and thousands of slaves. Stevenson brilliantly recounts their stories as she builds the complex picture of their intertwined lives, revealing how their combined histories guaranteed Loudon's role in important state, regional, and national events and controversies. Both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, for example, were hidden at a local plantation during the War of 1812. James Monroe wrote his famous "Doctrine" at his Loudon estate. The area also was the birthplace of celebrated fugitive slave Daniel Dangerfield, the home of John Janney, chairman of the Virginia secession convention, a center for Underground Railroad activities, and the location of John Brown's infamous 1859 raid at Harpers Ferry. In exploring the central role of the family, Brenda Stevenson offers a wealth of insight: we look into the lives of upper class women, who bore the oppressive weight of marriage and motherhood as practiced in the South and the equally burdensome roles of their husbands whose honor was tied to their ability to support and lead regardless of their personal preference; the yeoman farm family's struggle for respectability; and the marginal economic existence of free blacks and its undermining influence on their family life. Most important, Stevenson breaks new ground in her depiction of slave family life. Following the lead of historian Herbert Gutman, most scholars have accepted the idea that, like white, slaves embraced the nuclear family, both as a living reality and an ideal. Stevenson destroys this notion, showing that the harsh realities of slavery, even for those who belonged to such attentive masters as George Washington, allowed little possibility of a nuclear family. Far more important were extended kin networks and female headed households. Meticulously researched, insightful, and moving, Life in Black and White offers our most detailed portrait yet of the reality of southern life. It forever changes our understanding of family and race relations during the reign of the peculiar institution in the American South.

Through oral history, Falk (sociology, U. of Maryland, College Park) tells the story of those who stayed behind as millions of African Americans left the South in the Great Migration for what they hoped would be a better life in the North. Members of an extended family in the Georgia-South Carolina lowlands talk about schooling, kinship, work, religion, race, and their love of the place where their family has lived for generations. The "conversational ethnography" argues that a link between race and place in the area helps explain African American loyalty to it; for those who stayed put, a numerical majority, deep cultural roots, and longstanding webs of social connection have outweighed racism and economic disadvantages. Annotation : 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

With numerous selections designed to reinforce the goal of empowering clients to take charge of their lives, this revised and updated second edition of The Black Family serves a two-fold purpose. It extends the small but growing body of strength-oriented literature to include African-American families and it serves as a natural extension of current texts on African-American families to provide social workers and the education community with a broader framework for understanding the needs of Black families. Offering both a research orientation and a practice perspective, this book should appeal to social work educators and practitioners involved in family services, health and mental health settings, and child and public welfare.

Updated and expanded in this revised edition to reflect twenty years of new research, when published in 1979 Black Bostonianswas the first comprehensive social history of an antebellum northern black community. The Hortons challenged the then widely held view that African Americans in the antebellum urban north were all trapped in "a culture of poverty." Exploring life in black Boston from the eighteenth century to the eve of the Civil War, they combined quantitative and traditional historical methods to reveal the rich fabric of a thriving society, where people from all walks of life organized for mutual aid, survival, and social action, and which was a center of the antislavery movement. CONTENTS: Profile of Black Boston. Families and Households in Black Boston. Formal and Informal Organizations and Associations. The Community and the Church. Leaders and Community Activists. Segregation, Discrimination, and Community Resistance. The Integration of Abolition. The Fugitive and the Community. A Decade of Militancy.

Why stigmatizing and confining a large segment of our population should be unacceptable to all Americans. The United States, home to five percent of the world's population, now houses twenty-five percent of the world's prison inmates. Our incarceration rate—at 714 per 100,000 residents and rising—is almost forty percent greater than our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). More pointedly, it is 6.2 times the Canadian rate and 12.3 times the rate in Japan. Economist Glenn Loury argues that this extraordinary mass incarceration is not a response to rising crime rates or a proud success of social policy. Instead, it is the product of a generation-old collective decision to become a more punitive society. He connects this policy to our history of racial oppression, showing that the punitive turn in American politics and culture emerged in the post-civil rights years and has today become the main vehicle for the reproduction of racial hierarchies. Whatever the explanation, Loury argues, the uncontroversial fact is that changes in our criminal justice system since the 1970s have created a nether class of Americans—vastly disproportionately black and brown—with severely restricted rights and life chances. Moreover, conservatives and liberals agree that the growth in our prison population has long passed the point of diminishing returns. Stigmatizing and confining of a large segment of our population should be unacceptable to Americans. Loury's call to action makes all of us now responsible for ensuring that the policy changes.