Social Work and the Black Experience

“Must” reading for social work practioners. A comprehensive, useful, and valuable source for understanding the importance of the responsibilities of black social workers. (It) fills a need for a serious treatment of the role of black people in social work. A book that will become an important sourcebook for scholars and practitioners.

Maggie Johnson, PhD

Director, MSW Program, Cleveland State University

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Elmer and Joanne Martin offer a heuristic framework for social work practice in the black community—“black experience-based social work." Their book Social Work and the Black Experience combines an eloquent account of black social work pioneers with a social work approach that emphasizes the “interconnectedness” of black history and black culture and, in turn, offers commonsense social work tools for helping clients gain mastery over their sometimes hostile environments. These authors contend that the richness of black spirituality and folk tradition provides both meaning and cues for social work practice. For those of us who have struggled with ways to infuse black spirituality with practice, Social Work and the Black Experience provides an important conceptual template.

R. O. Washington, PhD

Professor, Social Policy, University of New Orleans

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Martin and Martin have given us a marvelous interpretation of the black experience for social workers. By blending the idiom of the black cultural and personal experience with established theory, they achieve what few others have dared. Anyone who has doubted their own fluency in the black experience will find in this book an excellent translation.

Leon W. Chestang, PhD

Dean, School of Social Work, Wayne State University