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.