Pioneering African-American families, spanning generations from slavery to freedom, enrich Savannah's collective history. Men and women such as Andrew Bryan, founder of the nation's oldest continuous black Baptist church; the Rev. Ralph Mark Gilbert, who revitalized the NAACP in Savannah; and Rebecca Stiles Taylor, founder of the Federation of Colored Women Club, are among those lauded in this retrospective. Savannah's black residents have made immeasurable contributions to the city and are duly celebrated and remembered in this volume.

Original and far-reaching, this book shows the resources for Black theology within the living tradition of African-American religion and culture. Beginning with the slave narratives, Hopkins tells how slaves received their masters' faith and transformed it into a gospel of liberation. Resources include the works of W.E.B. Du Bois, Toni Morrison, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X.

Using an intersectional approach, Marriage, Divorce, and Distress in Northeast Brazil explores rural, working-class, black Brazilian women's perceptions and experiences of courtship, marriage and divorce. In this book, women's narratives of marriage dissolution demonstrate the ways in which changing gender roles and marriage expectations associated with modernization and globalization influence the intimate lives and the health and well being of women in Northeast Brazil. Melanie A. Medeiros explores the women's rich stories of desire, love, respect, suffering, strength, and transformation.

Marriage has been a contested term in African American studies. Contributors to this special issue address the subject of "black marriage," broadly conceived and imaginatively considered from different vantage points. Historically, some scholars have maintained that the systematic enslavement of Africans completely undermined and effectively destroyed the institutions of heteropatriarchal marriage and family, while others have insisted that slaves found creative ways to be together, love each other, and build enduring conjugal relationships and family networks in spite of forced separations, legal prohibitions against marriage, and other hardships of the plantation system. Still others have pointed out that not all African Americans were slaves and that free black men and women formed stable marriages, fashioned strong nuclear and extended families, and established thriving black communities in antebellum cities in both the North and the South. Against the backdrop of such scholarship, contributors look back to scholarly, legal, and literary treatments of the marriage question and address current concerns, from Beyonce's music and marriage to the issues of interracial coupling, marriage equality, and the much-discussed decline in African American marriage rates. Contributors: Ann duCille, Oneka LaBennett, Mignon Moore, Kevin Quashie, Renee Romano, Hortense Spillers, Kendall Thomas, Rebecca Wanzo, Patricia Williams

Offering suggestions to correct the dehumanization of African American children, this book explains how to ensure that African American boys grow up to be strong, committed, and responsible African American men.