Tally's Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men

Elliot Liebow's 1967 Tally's Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men has become one of the sociological classics on the condition of the American Black family, and particularly on the American black man as well as on the effects on the family of welfare in relationship to a social and economic underclass defined by race.

Liebow based this book on 18 months of fieldwork that he performed in 1962-63 when he lived among a group of seemingly socially and culturally unanchored men in a poor, even destitute inner-city neighborhood in Washington D.C. The major effect of the book when it was published in the 1960s was to open the eyes of mainstream (i.e. white) America to the conditions of life for so many black men in post-war American society.

The most striking thing about reading this work is how relevant it remains, for Liebow's descriptions of men who find themselves with no easy (or even difficult) way to link themselves to the mainstream goals of society and the personal consequences of such forced cultural disassociation are chillingly similar to the fate of so many young African-American men -- and their would-be families -- today.

The greatest flaw in the book (for the current reader) is not one that can be blamed on Liebow but simply results from the passage of nearly 40 years since he was making his observations in the field. Liebow was writing about the United States at the cusp of the Civil Rights Movement, a time when it is hardly to be expected that racism would

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