For the African-American family, life ain't been no crystal stair. The African-American family has trotted for over 400 years through a wilderness of racism, poverty, discrimination of all kinds, crossing seas of monsters and forests of demons. Yet, despite the numerous obstacles and attacks that society has mounted against it since slavery, the authors believe that the African-American family has found creative ways to survive, retain some of its African values and structure, and fulfill its functions to this society. By presenting a variety of tools such as statistics, studies, and real-life stories, this article presents culturally compatible frameworks for understanding the delivery of educational, social, and mental health services to African-American families and communities. There are very few, if any, single theoretical models unique to understanding the nature and the complexity of African-American family life. Therefore, the authors offer a combination of Afrocentric and structural functional theories as theoretical lenses to organize the discussion of the available literature on African-American families. They present them as harmonious and mutually compatible frameworks for addressing not only the social, historical, political, and economic realities of African-American family life, but also as frameworks that aggressively wrestle with interlocking agendas, identities, oppressions, realities, and the marginality of the African-American family.