A longtime village resident has published her latest book, delving into a societal problem and hoping to get the attention of politicians and policymakers to improve the situation.
Barbara Fleming, Ph.D., who arrived with her husband, John E. Fleming, to Yellow Springs in 1988, recently released “African American Mothers: Their Children and Their Poverty in America in the First Quarter of the Twenty-First Century.” The book is available on Amazon.com. As a small independent publisher, she also has a website: silvermaplepublications.com.
“I write in several genres,” Fleming said. “I started writing mystery novels. More recently I have been writing in the field I always worked in: social science research.”
Fleming has a bachelor’s degree in psychology, and a master’s and a doctorate in developmental psychology.
“My career has been in research and writing,” she said.
“African American Mothers: Their Children and Their Poverty in America in the First Quarter of the Twenty-First Century,” by local resident Barbara Fleming was published earlier this year and is available on Amazon.com.
Her research into African American parents, their children and poverty comprise her recent book.
“One of the things that has happened to the Black family in America in the past half century, or more,” she said, “is that the rate of marriage has declined significantly. Far more than in the white community.”
She said her research showed that 35% of Black children live in a two-parent family, compared with 75% of white children.
Fleming points to a 1965 study written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a scholar who at the time was assistant secretary of Labor under President Lyndon Johnson, predicting the disintegration of the Black family.
“There was a lot of pushback against him by Black social scientists, who thought that was a particularly negative evaluation. As it turned out,” Fleming said, “he was right.”
She added that the rise in single-parent families “is occurring not only in America among African American families, but all over the western world.”
By Dennis Bova
