Love and Marriage in Early African America PDF Download

Author: Frances Smith Foster
Publisher: Northeastern University Press
ISBN: 9781555536763
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Love and Marriage in Early African America brings together a remarkable range of folk sayings, rhymes, songs, poems, letters, lectures, sermons, short stories, memoirs, and autobiographies. Spanning over 100 years, from the slave era to the New Negro Movement, this extraordinary collection contradicts or nuances established notions that slavery fractured families, devalued sexual morality, distorted gender roles, and set in motion forces that now produce dismal and dangerous domestic situations. A culmination of twenty years of diligent research by noted scholar Frances Smith Foster, this anthology features selections on love and courtship, marriage, marriage rituals, and family. A compelling introduction places the primary texts in their social and literary context. A bibliography offers suggestions for further reading. This volume includes materials by well known writers such as Frances E. W. Harper, Charles Chesnutt, and Alice Dunbar Nelson, but the majority of works are previously unknown or difficult-to-access materials. Many provide startling contrasts to representations in canonical literature. For example, “Patrick Brown’s First Love” is a radical alternative to Frederick Douglass’s “The Heroic Slave,” and Thomas Detter’s “The Octoroon” replaces the traditionally tragic mulatto trope with a female protagonist who shocks and awes. Love and Marriage in Early African America also changes our ideas about the relationship between religion and politics in early African America by featuring texts from the Afro-Protestant press; that is, the publishing organizations, writers, and reading groups under the direct auspices of, or publicly associated with, Afro-Protestant churches.

Author: Dianne M. Stewart
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781580058087
Category : FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
In this analysis of social history, examine the complex lineage of America's oppression of Black companionship.According to the 2010 US census, more than seventy percent of Black women in America are unmarried. Black Women, Black Love reveals how four centuries of laws, policies, and customs have created that crisis.Dianne Stewart begins in the colonial era, when slave owners denied Blacks the right to marry, divided families, and, in many cases, raped enslaved women and girls. Later, during Reconstruction and the ensuing decades, violence split up couples again as millions embarked on the Great Migration north, where the welfare system mandated that women remain single in order to receive government support. And no institution has forbidden Black love as effectively as the prison-industrial complex, which removes Black men en masse from the pool of marriageable partners.Prodigiously researched and deeply felt, Black Women, Black Love reveals how white supremacy has systematically broken the heart of Black America, and it proposes strategies for dismantling the structural forces that have plagued Black love and marriage for centuries.

Author: Frances Smith Foster
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199886970
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Conventional wisdom tells us that marriage was illegal for African Americans during the antebellum era, and that if people married at all, their vows were tenuous ones: "until death or distance do us part." It is an impression that imbues beliefs about black families to this day. But it's a perception primarily based on documents produced by abolitionists, the state, or other partisans. It doesn't tell the whole story. Drawing on a trove of less well-known sources including family histories, folk stories, memoirs, sermons, and especially the fascinating writings from the Afro-Protestant Press,'Til Death or Distance Do Us Part offers a radically different perspective on antebellum love and family life. Frances Smith Foster applies the knowledge she's developed over a lifetime of reading and thinking. Advocating both the potency of skepticism and the importance of story-telling, her book shows the way toward a more genuine, more affirmative understanding of African American romance, both then and now.

Author: Gil Robertson
Publisher: Agate Publishing
ISBN: 157284714X
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Where Did Our Love Go?, an anthology of essays written by many major public figures and celebrities, will explore the substantive issues related to marital problem in the African-American community. From the "my baby's mama" syndrome to the more serious implications of what a generation of single-parent households will mean to future generations, this comprehensive collection will provide an in-depth discourse on the trends and issues that have caused the problematic behaviors within African-American relationships to persist with little sign of relief. The book will consist of a total of 40 essays divided equally into 4 lifestyle categories (single, married, divorced, and widowed), to present a wide cross section of perspectives on this subject. Marriage plays an essential role in maintaining the vitality and character of a community, so it is deeply unsettling for many African Americans to find that the value of this institution has lost its allure. While marriage among African Americans has always fallen below the average of other population segments, the gap today has grown so pronounced that the subject has sparked an intense national dialogue. A 2006 Washington Post article, “Is Marriage for White People,” created waves of controversy on the issue. In 2010, Nightline dedicated an entire broadcast to this growing crisis. The marriage gap in Black America has become such an open secret that it’s now the source of endless bad jokes and prime time reality shows. The statistics even back this up, as according to the U.S. Census, 43.3% of black men and 41.9% of black women in America have never been married, and the rate of decline is nearly twice the national average. Marriage is a rite of passage that is fundamental to every culture, which underscores the tremendous need for an active dialogue to take place that will lay a foundation for discovery. With essays from 50 Cent, Viola Davis, Jabari Asim, Darnell Williams, Faith Evans, Mara Brock Akil, and more, Where Did Our Love Go? will ignite the fight for that conversation to begin.

Author: Tera W. Hunter
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674979249
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
Winner of the Stone Book Award, Museum of African American History Winner of the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize Winner of the Littleton-Griswold Prize Winner of the Mary Nickliss Prize Winner of the Willie Lee Rose Prize Americans have long viewed marriage between a white man and a white woman as a sacred union. But marriages between African Americans have seldom been treated with the same reverence. This discriminatory legacy traces back to centuries of slavery, when the overwhelming majority of black married couples were bound in servitude as well as wedlock, but it does not end there. Bound in Wedlock is the first comprehensive history of African American marriage in the nineteenth century. Drawing from plantation records, legal documents, and personal family papers, it reveals the many creative ways enslaved couples found to upend white Christian ideas of marriage. “A remarkable book... Hunter has harvested stories of human resilience from the cruelest of soils... An impeccably crafted testament to the African-Americans whose ingenuity, steadfast love and hard-nosed determination protected black family life under the most trying of circumstances.” —Wall Street Journal “In this brilliantly researched book, Hunter examines the experiences of slave marriages as well as the marriages of free blacks.” —Vibe “A groundbreaking history... Illuminates the complex and flexible character of black intimacy and kinship and the precariousness of marriage in the context of racial and economic inequality. It is a brilliant book.” —Saidiya Hartman, author of Lose Your Mother

Author: Ralph Richard Banks
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0452297532
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
A distinguished Stanford law professor examines the steep decline in marriage rates among the African American middle class, and offers a paradoxical-nearly incendiary-solution. Black women are three times as likely as white women to never marry. That sobering statistic reflects a broader reality: African Americans are the most unmarried people in our nation, and contrary to public perception the racial gap in marriage is not confined to women or the poor. Black men, particularly the most successful and affluent, are less likely to marry than their white counterparts. College educated black women are twice as likely as their white peers never to marry. Is Marriage for White People? is the first book to illuminate the many facets of the African American marriage decline and its implications for American society. The book explains the social and economic forces that have undermined marriage for African Americans and that shape everyone's lives. It distills the best available research to trace the black marriage decline's far reaching consequences, including the disproportionate likelihood of abortion, sexually transmitted diseases, single parenthood, same sex relationships, polygamous relationships, and celibacy among black women. This book centers on the experiences not of men or of the poor but of those black women who have surged ahead, even as black men have fallen behind. Theirs is a story that has not been told. Empirical evidence documents its social significance, but its meaning emerges through stories drawn from the lives of women across the nation. Is Marriage for White People? frames the stark predicament that millions of black women now face: marry down or marry out. At the core of the inquiry is a paradox substantiated by evidence and experience alike: If more black women married white men, then more black men and women would marry each other. This book not only sits at the intersection of two large and well- established markets-race and marriage-it responds to yearnings that are widespread and deep in American society. The African American marriage decline is a secret in plain view about which people want to know more, intertwining as it does two of the most vexing issues in contemporary society. The fact that the most prominent family in our nation is now an African American couple only intensifies the interest, and the market. A book that entertains as it informs, Is Marriage for White People? will be the definitive guide to one of the most monumental social developments of the past half century.

Author: Frances Smith Foster
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780199389704
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Conventional wisdom tells us that marriage was illegal for African Americans during the antebellum era, and that if people married at all, their vows were tenuous ones: "until death or distance do us part." It is an impression that imbues beliefs about black families to this day. But it's a perception primarily based on documents produced by abolitionists, the state, or other partisans. It doesn't tell the whole story. Drawing on a trove of less well-known sources including family histories, folk stories, memoirs, sermons, and especially the fascinating writings from the Afro-Protestant Press, 'Til Death or Distance Do Us Part offers a radically different perspective on antebellum love and family life. Frances Smith Foster applies the knowledge she's developed over a lifetime of reading and thinking. Advocating both the potency of skepticism and the importance of story-telling, her book shows the way toward a more genuine, more affirmative understanding of African American romance, both then and now.

Author: Jennifer Cole
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226113558
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
In recent years, scholarly interest in love has flourished. Historians have addressed the rise of romantic love and marriage in Europe and the United States, while anthropologists have explored the ways globalization has reshaped local ideas about those same topics. Yet, love in Africa has been peculiarly ignored, resulting in a serious lack of understanding about this vital element of social life—a glaring omission given the intense focus on sexuality in Africa in the wake of HIV/AIDS. Love in Africa seeks both to understand this failure to consider love and to begin to correct it. In a substantive introduction and eight essays that examine a variety of countries and range in time from the 1930s to the present, the contributors collectively argue for the importance of paying attention to the many different cultural and historical strands that constitute love in Africa. Covering such diverse topics as the reception of Bollywood movies in 1950s Zanzibar, the effects of a Mexican telenovela on young people’s ideas about courtship in Niger, the models of romance promoted by South African and Kenyan magazines, and the complex relationship between love and money in Madagascar and South Africa, Love in Africa is a vivid and compelling look at love’s role in African society.

Author: Aneeka Ayanna Henderson
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469651777
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
In Veil and Vow, Aneeka Ayanna Henderson places familiar, often politicized questions about the crisis of African American marriage in conversation with a rich cultural archive that includes fiction by Terry McMillan and Sister Souljah, music by Anita Baker, and films such as The Best Man. Seeking to move beyond simple assessments of marriage as "good" or "bad" for African Americans, Henderson critically examines popular and influential late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century texts alongside legislation such as the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act and the Welfare Reform Act, which masked true sources of inequality with crisis-laden myths about African American family formation. Using an interdisciplinary approach to highlight the influence of law, politics, and culture on marriage representations and practices, Henderson reveals how their kinship veils and unveils the fiction in political policy as well as the complicated political stakes of fictional and cultural texts. Providing a new opportunity to grapple with old questions, including who can be a citizen, a "wife," and "marriageable," Veil and Vow makes clear just how deeply marriage still matters in African American culture.

Author: W. Bradford Wilcox
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199908311
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
In 1994, David Hernandez, a small-time drug-dealer in Spanish Harlem, got out of the drug business and turned his life over to God. After he joined Victory Chapel-a vibrant Bronx-based Pentecostal church-he saw his life change in many ways: today he is a member of the NYPD, married, the father of three, and still an active member of his church. David Hernandez is just one of the many individuals whose stories inform Soul Mates, which draws on both national surveys and in-depth interviews to paint a detailed portrait of the largely positive influence exercised by churches on relationships and marriage among African Americans and Latinos-and whites as well. Soul Mates shines a much-needed spotlight on the lives of strong and happy minority couples. Wilcox and Wolfinger find that both married and unmarried minority couples who attend church together are significantly more likely to enjoy happy relationships than black and Latino couples who do not regularly attend. They argue that churches serving these communities promote a code of decency encompassing hard work, temperance, and personal responsibility that benefits black and Latino families. Wilcox and Wolfinger provide a compelling look at faith and family life among blacks and Latinos. The book offers a wealth of critical insight into the effect of religion on minority relationships, as well as the unique economic and cultural challenges facing African American and Latino families in twenty-first-century America.