This book analyses the evolution of the contemporary African American family from historical cultural and social policy perspectives in an effort to understand why marital ties have weakened among poor African Americans and why mother-only families have increasingly become a normal feature of ghetto poverty. Franklin argues that the cumulative effects of slavery, sharecropping, and urbanization significantly weakened African American family ties and that mother-only families emerged in the early 20th century as a response to the instability of wage labour for African Americans.

RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN BLACK MEN AND WOMEN IN AMERICA ARE IN CRISIS. IT'S TIME TO FIGURE OUT WHAT'S GONE WRONG AND START THE HEALING PROCESS.

The current divorce rates for black couples has quadrupled since 1960 and is now double that of the general population, rates of domestic violence in black marriages are skyrocketing, and nearly half of married black men admit to having been unfaithful. In What's Love Got to Do with It? Donna Franklin, one of the country's leading African-American sociologists, speaks out on these painful, complex issues, providing an incisive and riveting analysis of the gender tensions that are the legacy of slavery and its aftermath.

Franklin breaks new ground in explaining why black men and women have trouble relating to each other and examines their profoundly different starting points, which are influenced by generations of racism and injustice. She shows how black women's strength and self-sufficiency can be used to nurture relationships. Likewise, she teaches black men how to support one another and their relationships with women without excluding women, as has happened with the Million Man March.

The challenge of mending the rift between black men and women is formidable, but can be made easier. Understanding is the first step on the path to healing.

There is a crisis today in the American family, and this crisis has been particularly severe in the African American community. Black women and men are more likely than ever to remain single, and as a result, a staggering number of African-American children are growing up in households that do not include their biological fathers. In this revised edition of an award winning book, Donna L. Franklin and co-author Angela D. James expand and update the nuanced historical perspective used in the first edition to understand African American family patterns. The result is a well-documented narrative that challenges conventional understanding of the continuing plight of African American families. Ensuring Inequality traces the evolution of the black family from slavery to the present, showing the cumulative effects of centuries of historical change. Beginning with a richly researched account of the impact of slavery on the black family, the authors point out that slavery not only caused extreme instability and suffering for families, but established a lasting pattern of poverty which made the economic advantages of marriage unattainable for many. Providing sharp critiques of the full range of federal policies, from the Freedmen's Bureau during Reconstruction, to contemporary changes in penal and welfare policies, the authors suggest a prominent role of such policy in constructing the circumstances of black family life. The revised edition updates the final chapters of this comprehensive and nuanced study by exploring changes in marriage patterns over time. It also provides an expanded consideration of the impact on the urban poor of the massive changes in the economy in the recent past and of mass incarceration. The authors demonstrate how each of these changes has operated to dramatically reduce the marriage options of men and women in urban communities. Exhaustively researched and insightfully written, Ensuring Inequality continues to make an important contribution.