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.

In the black helping tradition, spirituality is the sense of the sacred and divine. It is a critical value deeply rooted in the African worldview and used by African Americans as a tool for survival. Provocative and well-written, this is the first book to draw a relationship between social work, spirituality, and the helping tradition among African Americans. Offering a wealth of historical detail and narrative, Elmer and Joanne Martin explore spirituality as a foundation for understanding people of African descent and as a skill to evoke self-help. This ground-breaking book raises compelling questions about the limitations and strengths of mainstream social work in issues of black spirituality and its role in strengthening the black community today.

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

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.

With this purported new "era of high-profile, mega successful, black women who are changing the face of every major field worldwide" and growing socioeconomic diversity among black women as the backdrop, Embracing Sisterhood seeks to determine where contemporary black women's ideas of black womanhood and sisterhood merge with social class status to shape certain attachments and detachments among them. Similarities as well as variations in how black women of different social backgrounds perceive and live black womanhood are interpreted for a range of social contexts. This book confirms what many of today's African-American women and interested observers have known for some time: Conceptions and experience of black womanhood are quite diverse and appear to have grown more diverse over time. However, the potential for a pervasive and polarizing black "step-sisterhood" is considerably undermined by the passion with which these women cling to the promises of cross-class gender/ethnic "community" and of group determination. Embracing Sisterhood draws its analysis from in-depth interviews with eighty-eight contemporary black women aged 18 to 89 covering a variety of issues prompted by a survey questionnaire capturing various dimensions of gender/ethnic identity and consciousness.

Voices of Color: First Person Accounts of Ethnic Minority Therapists is the first book to address the training, academic, and professional experiences of ethnic minority therapists. Using real cases, narratives, and biographical material, each chapter motivates the reader to ponder and challenge how issues related to mental health intersect with race/ethnicity within a broader diversity framework. The contributors represent various mental health disciplines, and they all write from a systemic perspective on therapy cases, theory, new models, and research. The authors present powerful narratives of how their personal and professional experiences inform each other. These insider perspectives are placed within a broader systemic context highlighting the interplay between personal, academic, and professional political relationships and their symbiotic impact on individuals, families, and communities. These combined voices of color add a new and significant perspective to the awareness of students, clinicians, educators, supervisors, and administrators regarding their personal position vis-à-vis psychotherapy, different multicultural dimensions, and social justice.