"The Cambridge Studies in Stratification Economics: Economics and Social Identity series encourages book proposals that emphasize structural sources of group-based inequality, rather than cultural or genetic factors. Studies in this series will utilize the underlying economic principles of self-interested behavior and substantive rationality in conjunction with sociology's emphasis on group behavior and identity formation. The series is interdisciplinary, drawing authors from various fields including economics, sociology, social psychology, history, and anthropology, with all projects focused on topics dealing with group-based inequality, identity, and economic well-being"--

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.