Black Families Online

If you are a Black parent looking online for multicultural educational tools, where do you go? Google? Yahoo? MSN? Those were the correct answers and only resorts until today. Instead of searching through irrelevant site after irrelevant site, all you need to have is a copy of Black Families Online: Directory of Online Resources for Black Parents handy, peruse its contents, plug in the given URLs and you're in business.

Stacey Montgomery, the publisher of the premiere Black parenting website, Celebrating Children http://www.celebratingchildren.com wrote the recently released Black Families Online: Directory of Online Resources for Black Parents after she had difficulty finding Black websites herself. Realizing how hard it is for parents to find quality Black consumer, informational and educational sites, Montgomery set out to amass as many sites as she could and compile them into one book. Montgomery says in the introduction that, "With the growing use of the Internet by Black people, there is a growing number of websites targeted to Black families." This is certainly true. The evidence? Black Families Online is now a compilation of nearly 400 Black sites that offers products ranging from Black and multicultural educational tools to Black parenting sites and everything in between.

As a handy resource tool, Black Families Online is divided into twenty different chapters some of which include "Dolls, Toys and Games", "Greeting Cards and Other Paper Products" and "Magazines". All of the nearly 400 given sites are either wholly Black-oriented, multicultural or sites that are not specifically targeted to Black parents, but contain a considerable amount of information useful to Black families. One of the most helpful features of Black Families Online is the thoroughness of the summaries following each site title and URL. Montgomery lets you know if the site has online purchasing capabilities or if the site has a Yahoo! group that you may join in addition to perusing the site, for example. You'll also find the site summaries particularly helpful as they contain book titles relevant to the site and other interesting informational tidbits that make the site worth visiting.

The most appealing aspect of the book, however, is the connection that Montgomery creates between the reader and some of the actual site owners. Quotes from site owners, lightly dispersed throughout the book, reveal the personal reasons behind the making of some of the sites as well as thoughts about the importance of the Internet and the online presence in the Black community. Pamela Anderson, author and publisher of Watch Me Grow Kids, http://www.watchmegrowkids.com says, "As a business owner, it is important to have a website to reach black families because products targeting their needs are more difficult to get distributed through the retail outlets most frequently patronized by the general public."

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