Land, Promise, and Peril

Mary Coleman is the Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Economic Mobility Pathways (EMPath), a Boston-based non-profit that disrupts poverty through direct services, advocacy, research, and a global learning network. As a child and adult, mentor, college professor, administrator, and citizen Mary has wanted to know why and how working poor families exit poverty and sustain their exits across generations. Working in dispossessed lands across four continents, and as a child who attended both segregated and desegregated public schools, she knows first-hand that prospects for a decent world are explicitly linked to opportunities for intergenerational familial and national thriving.

Preface; Acknowledgements; Part I. The Family in an Intemperate Community, State, and Nation: 1. Families' cross-century struggles to leave dispossession behind; 2. The sunflower county delta; 3. Multigenerational injury, insult, and adversity; 4. Patterns of dispossession; 5. Manufactured and natural disasters; 6. Position-taking in the nation; Part II. Family Interiority and Economic Mobility Pathways: 7. Perennial sharecroppers; 8. Quasi-croppers; 9. The mule-renter; 10. The kinship farmers; 11. Contemporaries of the second generation of the sunflower seven; 12. The central hills family in struggle; Part III. Pathways Toward Upward Economic Mobility: 13. Beyond caste in higher education; 14. The war on poverty in sunflower; 15. What the scholarship tells us; 16. Insights and valedictory; Epilogue; Bibliography; Index.