The King family was a twentieth-century anomaly: a middle-class black family in rural Mississippi. Using family narratives, census data, and employing a socio-ecological lens, this book illustrates how family decisions affected generations across time as they navigated dynamics like segregation, migration, education, religion, and urban living.
Examines how a twentieth-century middle-class black family navigated life in stratified rural Mississippi.
Advance praise: 'This provocative, well-crafted book greatly extends research on Black families rooted in and migrating from the Deep South. Barnes and Blanford-Jones provide a revealing socio-ecological window of understanding into the worlds of Black families over generations of constructing lives in the face of white racism and poverty. From richly detailed interviews, we see these courageous Americans proactively and often successfully drawing on landed, religious (Black churches), educational (Black schools), and resistance (counter-framing) capital to not only surmount omnipresent barriers to individual and family mobility but also help build a much better America.' Joe Feagin, Texas A & M University and author of Racist America
