The weight of the shame, sociologists have long thought, explained why many relationships fell apart in poor black neighborhoods. Especially for jobless men, the indignity of facing your family empty-handed built up to the point where abandonment became the lesser disgrace. To stay in a committed relationship was “to live with your failure, to be confronted by it day in and day out….In self-defense, the husband retreated to the streetcorner.” Most single mothers had no street-corner reprieve. Elliot Liebow, Tally’s Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men (Boston: Little, Brown and Company,
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