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This chapter looks at the experience of empire, via presenting a history and the writings of the family of John Black during the eighteenth century. The Blacks were a family of Aberdeen extraction, which included both Presbyterian and conforming members. On the side of politics, they were pro-Stuart at first, but this changed when they moved to Ireland as part of the opposition to Cromwell. In the 1690s, they started to support the Williamites. The Black family were a family of traders, and with their dealings with several countries, they clearly understood the relativity of cultural norms and identities. Their most famous member, John Black, showed the family's flexibility by maneuvering around both Britain and France during the Seven Years War, which he did in order to protect his assets in Bordeaux.

This chapter is set in Kansas City, Missouri and Los Angeles, California and demonstrates how Flo Kennedy’s parents contributed to the formation of her black feminist radicalism. Her parents not only stood up for themselves and their daughters against racist white authorities but also held progressive views about personal autonomy and female sexuality. Kennedy’s mother allowed her to kiss boys on the front porch and to discuss taboo topics, such as the scents and sensations of a woman’s body. Both her mother and father actively defended themselves against entrenched forms of power and had numerous run-ins with the Ku Klux Klan, white employers, and black school officials. They taught Kennedy not to defer to any type of authority. The sexual freedom that Kennedy experienced and the battles with both black and white authorities that she witnessed helped her to embrace a black feminist politics and reject the politics of respectability and other social constraints that inhibited black women’s political activism and mobility.

This chapter explores the roles played by family, church, and community in the Black Underground Railroad movement. By mapping Black settlements, it clarifies and exposes the relationship between African American churches, settlements, and historic Underground Railroad routes. It shows how Black families sustained an important family organizational structure that drove the Underground Railroad. It explains how African American communities connected through family relations and intermarriage, church organizations, benevolent societies, and the fraternal structure of the Prince Hall Masons. It considers how maintaining family connections motivated escape from slavery, particularly when imminent sale threatened to break up the family. Finally, it highlights the ways that Black churches and their ministers helped free Blacks, or self-liberated men and women, to succeed in winning freedom for themselves and their loved ones.

The chapter reconsiders Georgia’s chain gang labor system by shifting the lens from the Jim Crow South’s convict labor production to the medicalized control over incarcerated Black women’s reproduction. In its exploration of medicalized language and the role of doctors in convict labor camps, this chapter explores how incarcerated black women experienced reproductive exploitation and control after the Civil War. At the heart of this essay is the Jim Crow South’s broader assault on black motherhood and the ways in which the Southern convict labor camp was a site meant to regulate labor production and human reproduction as shared elements of a carceral network. During slavery, black women’s wombs were commodified. After slavery, they were no longer of value. The chapter concludes that the regulation of black woman and motherhood at the site of Southern prisons had deleterious consequences for black women and the black family that stretched beyond the prison.

This chapter studies several movements in the late 1970s and 1980s that rejected the idea that southern families were facing unique crises. Alex Haley’s popular Roots, several African American memoirists, and the Black Family Reunion all celebrated adaptable, creative families. Habitat for Humanity hoped to improve life for people in poverty without assuming those people’s problems had roots in troubled families. Southern feminist novelists detailed a multiplicity of family styles.

This chapter examines the continuing disparities between Whites and Blacks through extensive social science data and studies of the impacts of systemic racism. It first utilizes what demographers call the dissimilarity index to measure housing segregation in major metropolitan areas; cities with heavily Black populations, such as Detroit, have become “hyper-segregated” with almost total “social isolation” of Blacks. The chapter then examines the long-standing academic and political debates over the causes of systemic racism, beginning in 1965 with a government report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, by a young Labor Department aide, Daniel Patrick “Pat” Moynihan. He found the main cause of Black poverty and increasing single Black motherhood in the “pathology” of a “matriarchal” Black family structure in which males are neither needed nor welcome. Moynihan’s report spurred an angry rebuttal in a book by psychology professor William Ryan, Blaming the Victim, which found the main cause of Black poverty in the systemic racism of White society and culture. The chapter then looks at social science studies by William Julius Wilson (explaining the “racial invariance” of White and Black crime); psychologist John Dollard (explaining the prevalence of Black-on-Black crime with the “frustration-aggression-displacement” theory); and Black psychiatrists William Grier and Price Cobbs (explaining “Black rage” as rooted in White control of institutions that exclude or discriminate against Blacks). The chapter concludes with a look at the War on Drugs of the 1980s and 1990s and the resulting mass incarceration of Black men.

By focusing on the geography of resistance and its landscape features in four different Black settlements, this book has cast a different light on the nature of Black escape from slavery and the history of Underground Railroad activities. It has shown that free Blacks carried out much of the clandestine work of the Underground Railroad as they sought freedom in pre-Civil War America, thus contributing in a significant way to the efforts inside one of the world's most successful resistance movements. Whether urban or rural, Black settlements positioned at the borders between northern and southern states or at other critical junctures acted as the first line of freedom while simultaneously offering sanctuary to escaping captives. The book has also highlighted migration as a means of escape for fleeing slaves, as well as the crucial roles played by Black churches, Black families, and Black abolitionists in the success of the Black underground. This concluding chapter summaries the book's research strategies and the future implications of its findings for reshaping modern interpretation of the Underground Railroad.

This conclusion offers a brief overview of the National Council of Negro women (NCNW) from 1980 to the present, looking especially at its changes during the Regan era. After Ronald Regan's election, the NCNW lost a significant proportion of its federal grant funding. NCNW then began to build connections with private businesses through its network of professional black women. One example of this was that in 1986 the NCNW created the Black Family Reunion with significant support from Procter and Gamble. As government funding dried up, NCNW turned inward and began to focus again on broadening opportunities for professional and elite women. Today, NCNW continues to ensure that black women be given educational, political, and economic opportunities and serve in leadership positions in mainstream America.

This chapter covers various assorted gangs based on race, religion, and ethnicity, including African-American gangs such as the Black Guerrilla Family, the Vice Lords, the Crips and Bloods, and the Black Muslims; Hispanic and Latino gangs like The Neta and Latin Kings and the Mexican Mafia and La Nuestra Familia; and white nationalist groups like the Aryan Brotherhood. Also reviewed are the prison disturbances, rebellions, and riots that have occurred in all kinds of U.S. facilities.