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About 70 percent of African-American women do not live with a spouse

Date: 2007-01-29

About 70 percent of African-American women do not live with a spouse, the Census Bureau says. That's the direction in which Monica Blackwell-Harper once saw herself headed.

Although she wanted children, "I didn't want to get married," the 35-year-old from Forest Park says. "I didn't understand why people would (marry). It seemed like a bad idea, because in my circle, it seemed like everybody broke up." That included her parents, who divorced before she entered grade school.

She married despite those misgivings, and today both Blackwell-Harper and her husband, Tramell Harper, also 35, admit they're surprised their 11-year union survived its rocky start. They're thrilled it did, and the middle-class parents of three young children say their success is due, at least in part, to their ongoing efforts to learn how to be a good spouse.

A movement now under way hopes to multiply such successful marriages. Locally and nationally, programs are being offered - many funded by federal or state grants - with the goal of strengthening relationships and promoting the benefits of marriage, particularly among African-Americans.

The movement has gained momentum since 2002, when President Bush, citing research that shows children do best when raised in healthy, stable, two-parent households, launched his Healthy Marriage Initiative.

Critics have questioned the effectiveness of marriage-skills programs, which often are aimed at low-income couples, and say such programs could increase domestic violence by encouraging women to remain in dangerous relationships. Proponents claim just the opposite: The voluntary programs improve marital happiness and help reduce domestic violence.

Regardless, the effort faces big challenges. Statistics compiled by the federal Administration for Children and Families show that while all races are affected by divorce, single-parent homes and declines in marriage rates, the impact has been greater in the African-American community:

Blacks are more likely to be divorced (9.4 percent of males; 13.3 percent of females) than whites (9.1 percent and 11.3 percent, respectively) or Hispanics (5.9 percent and 9.3 percent).

Single female-headed families are far more likely in black homes (45 percent) than in white (13.7 percent) or Hispanic (22 percent) homes.

68 percent of African-American births are to unmarried women. For whites, it's 29 percent; Hispanics, 44 percent.

"We're in a crisis," says Jimmie Lee Walker, a retired Cincinnati Public Schools teacher and co-founder of Saving African American Families, a local nonprofit group that works to inform and empower blacks on health and family issues.

"For so long, (disintegration of the black family) was a hush-hush subject. The first goal is to get it out in the open, and to get people talking about ... marriage," she says.

Groups join forces

Anderson Township-based Beech Acres Parenting Center last year was awarded a $338,000 grant from the Ohio Strengthening Families Initiative to conduct a marriage awareness and education campaign aimed primarily at African-Americans. More than a dozen other groups have joined forces with Beech Acres to offer classes, workshops, marriage retreats and other training, through a coalition called Building Strong Marriages and Families.

The coalition includes S.O.A.R. Development Corp., a faith-based nonprofit agency established by Word of Deliverance Ministries for the World, a nondenominational, primarily African-American ministry in Forest Park. That's where Craig and Donita Jackson lead an eight-week class for couples, "Franklin Covey's Eight Habits of a Successful Marriage."

Craig, 37, is an assistant vice president for Fifth Third Bank. Donita, 35, is a middle school guidance counselor. Both were children of divorce, raised in single-parent homes. The experience "shaped our thoughts on marriage, in that we wanted to make sure when we did it, we were only going to be married one time," Craig says.

They married 13 years ago and have two children.

Most people "learn more about how to drive a car than how to live in a lifelong relationship with one person," Donita Jackson says. So when a marriage hits rough spots, "What are you supposed to do? You just don't know, especially when it hasn't been modeled for you in a healthy manner."

Donita says of the "Eight Habits" curriculum: "It's not cookie-cutter. She gets a book. He gets a book. You write in your own book and then collaborate: What do you want your relationship to look like? It's not someone preaching at you saying you should do A, B and C and then you'll be at D. It's about what works for you."

In a recent class, the Jacksons led a lively discussion with 10 couples, including Monica Blackwell-Harper, a stay-at-home mom, and Tramell Harper, a Procter & Gamble manager.

Their story is hardly a fairy tale of finding true love and living happily ever after. Both say they naively entered marriage, not knowing how to make it work. Early on, they came close to divorcing "a bunch of times," Harper says.

It doesn't come easily

A combination of factors turned things around for them, they say. While living in North Carolina, they began regularly attending a church that offered Bible studies focused on family issues. There, they met other married couples who were good role models. They committed themselves to making their marriage successful and came to understand that would happen only if they actively worked at it.

For the past 10 years, they've attended as many marriage programs and retreats as possible.

"We wanted to try to be married the way God intended marriage to be," Harper says.

Many of the marriage programs aimed at African-Americans are run by faith-based groups.

A church is "a logical place where you might impart this kind of information to couples. Also the African-American population is largely a very faith-oriented community," says Diann Dawson. As director of the Office of Regional Operations for the Administration for Children and Families, she helped create the federal African American Healthy Marriage Initiative.

It was in a church where the Rev. Eric White and his wife, the Rev. Angelia White, who've been married 17 years, say they found the role models who helped put their shaky marriage on track years ago. The Sycamore Township residents are pastors at Bread of Life Christian Center in Kennedy Heights.

"The best marriage ministry I believe a church can have is the pastor loving his wife," says Eric White. "It has to be modeled not only by the pastors, but by every married couple in the church."

One popular program

Some people feel that churches aren't doing enough to address marriage in the African-American community.

"So many pastors have problems with their marriages; some of them are ashamed of talking about marriage," says Charlie Winburn, senior pastor of the Encampment in College Hill.

Winburn and his wife of 26 years, Colleen, last year led a program they called Real Life Marriage Encounter that drew at least 300 couples, about 85 percent of them African-American. It was scheduled to run nine weeks, but expanded to 18 "by popular demand," Winburn says.

Winburn, a Cincinnati city councilman from 1993 to 2001, offered the program "because so many African-American marriages are falling apart, even those that have been married 10, 15, 20 years." The Encampment put up $50,000 to fund the program.

The range of topics included intimacy, infidelity, finances, blended families and the importance of communication.

"We found that 90 percent of the people who attended had a major problem with communication," he says.

John Garner agrees communication is a key, and it's addressed in Healthy Relationships classes he leads at Cincinnati-Hamilton County Community Action Agency in Bond Hill, one of the agencies in partnership with Beech Acres.

But relationships can be derailed by many other obstacles, he says. That's why he might refer low-income participants to the agency's job readiness, ex-offender, fatherhood, emergency rental assistance and financial planning programs, among others.

Attendance was sparse at a recent Healthy Relationships class, in part because of illness.

Tarus Adams and Kellie Harris of Colerain Township were one of just two couples.

"We're not married yet, and we have two children, but we're trying to move to the next level," Adams says afterward, buckling his 8-week-old daughter into a child seat.

"I think (the class) is going to help us understand each other a little bit better," Harris adds.

'Brutally honest'

If they come to understand each other the way Trammel Harper and Monica Blackwell-Harper do, they'll be fine. The couple say it takes commitment and perseverance.

"We are brutally honest with each other, and we're really there for each other. We have a lot of fun," Blackwell-Harper says.

Then the woman who once swore she'd never marry adds, "I can't believe I like it this much."





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