According to the 2010 US census, more than 70% of Black women in America are unmarried. Black Women, Black Love reveals how four centuries of laws, policies, and customs have created that crisis.

Personal stories sourced from contemporary letters, diaries, and interviews illuminate each example as Stewart documents the affronts to Black love endured over generations, in forms both brutal and bureaucratic: from slavery, through Reconstruction, the Great Migration, and the present era in which the welfare system mandated that women remain single in order to receive government support and the prison-industrial complex continues to remove Black men en masse from the pool of marriageable partners. She critically examines Eurocentric, patriarchal family structures that require a man to be “head of the household” and chief breadwinner, showing how these expectations clash with economic discrimination that Black men face. And she looks at the painful persistence of colorism and phenotypic stratification (CPS) and its psychological impact on the entire Black community, but especially dark-skinned women.

Finally, Stewart explores ways that public servants, the religious community, and allies can join Black women in beginning to undo the legacy of forbidden black love: proposals for creating pathways to financial stability and wealth building, strengthening the range of prosocial kinship networks beyond the nuclear family, and combatting deeply internalized bias against dark skin.

About the Author

Dianne M. Stewart is an associate professor of religion and African American studies at Emory University, where she created the course Black Love. She earned her MDiv from Harvard University Divinity School and her PhD in systematic theology from Union Theological Seminary in New York City.

She currently lives in Atlanta, Georgia.