America's Rising Black Middle Class

Black militancy. Black rage. Black separatism. Black crime. For years, these have been the catchwords that have discomfited and even chilled white Americans, for they imply an alien and hostile race scarcely at home in a land where it has lived for some 350 years. But another phrase may well become more familiar in the 1970s: Black middle class.

Beneath the more dramatic and widely reported clashes and confrontations, a reassuring process has been under way for the past decade. With little fanfare, without the rest of the society quite realizing it, more and more blacks are achieving the American dream of lifting themselves into the middle class. They have become as well heeled, well housed, and well educated as their white counterparts. Many have just arrived in the middle class, some are barely hanging on, some may lose their grip--but by any reasonable measurement, most appear there to stay. They have shown that, reports of its demise to the contrary, upward mobility still operates in America.

To be black in the U.S. is no longer to be subordinate--not necessarily. The national effort to give blacks a more equitable share of the nation's goods and benefits has had results--uneven but undeniable. Increasingly, blacks are seen in offices of corporations and banks, in classrooms of elite colleges, in officers' clubs, affluent suburbs, theaters, tourist haunts. Says Daniel C. Thompson, chairman of the sociology department at New Orleans' predominantly black Dillard University: "Being black and qualified is the most valuable commodity in American society."

As they have rapidly risen, middle-class blacks have learned to live more easily with whites--whether they like them or not. The best thing they can do for racial relations, many feel, is to do well. "Success is the best revenge," says Richard Clarke, owner of a large black employment agency in New York City. But as middle-class blacks have prospered, a gap has opened between them and the black underclass that remains mired in poverty and despair (see box page 26). The gap serves as a reminder of how far some have come and how many others still have to make the journey.

To be middle class is of course a matter of income, education, lifestyle, attitude and an almost indefinable sense of wellbeing. It is a feeling of being a useful, functioning part of society--not indispensable perhaps, but not easily dispensed with either. "Middle class means you can live above the survival level and have some whims as well as needs," says the Rev. William Lawson, a Baptist preacher in Houston. For Mary Davis, a Chicago urban planner, being middle class means "going to a good school, being clean and taking a bath." Evelyn Thompson, a reporter for KOOL-TV in Phoenix, recalling the well-done cuts of cheap pork that poor blacks consume, observes: "You know a black has been assimilated into the middle class if he eats rare meat."

In a controversial article last year in Commentary, Political Analysts Ben Wattenberg and Richard Scammon announced that a slim majority of blacks had made it into the middle class. They based this conclusion largely on the fact that a majority of blacks in the North earn more than $8,000 a year and a majority in the South make more than $6,000. Some black scholars scoffed that this was a perilously low income measure for the middle class in a time of oppressive inflation. They would prefer to place the floor as high as $11,500, in which case only a quarter of blacks would qualify as being middle class, as compared with nearly 50% of whites. Critics also argued that income gains were partly illusory because black families are more dependent than white families on the earnings of wives. But Eli Ginzberg, professor of economics at Columbia University, is persuaded that the upward trend in black earning power is "unequivocal. People can draw their lines wherever they want to."

The rise of the black middle class is confirmed by a variety of statistics:

> In 1961, 13% of American blacks earned $10,000 or more a year; by 1971 30% were making that amount, and 12% earned $15,000 or more.

> In 1964, the median income of black families was 54% that of white; in 1972 it was 59%.

> In the North and West, black husband-wife units headed by someone under 35 earned 93% of comparable white income in 1971; if both husband and wife worked, they made 105% of white earnings.

> Between 1967 and 1972 the number of blacks enrolled in college doubled to 727,000; 18% of all blacks aged 18 to 24 were attending college in 1972, compared with 26% of whites.

> Between 1960 and 1971 the number of blacks in professional and technical positions--doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, writers, entertainers --jumped by 128%, to 756,000. Meanwhile, the total number of these jobs increased by only 49%, to 11.1 million.

> In the same period, the number of black managers, officials and proprietors almost doubled, to 342,000, while the nation's total employment in these categories expanded by only 23%, to 8.7 million.

The rate of black progress demonstrated in the 1960s slowed somewhat in the early 1970s, and the income gap between the races widened a bit. There is a persistent feeling among blacks that their fragile prosperity might blow away with ill economic winds. When times are bad, blacks are often the first to lose their jobs --though there have been no noticeable layoffs of black skilled workers during the current recession. Says a $35,000-a-year urban planning executive in Detroit: "We constantly live with the paranoia that we'll get sick or fired. I'm constantly aware of the fact that if I were out of work for six months, I'd be on the skids."

Still, there is no quarreling with the fact that blacks have been moving into skilled and managerial jobs. Besides a generally fast-expanding economy in the past decade, there have been other contributing factors: pressure from the Federal Government to end discrimination in the marketplace; a more enlightened attitude on the part of business leaders, who actively recruit blacks; and of course the pertinacity of blacks themselves who recognize their opportunities and seize them. Surveying the job market from the vantage point of more than 30 years as publisher of Ebony, John H. Johnson marvels at the change. When he first started publishing, he saw only white faces in the business world. "But today," he says, "the bank officer who approved our $1.4 million loan was black. I know that a vice president of Columbia Records or our new representative from IBM is just as likely to be black as white. If someone comes to audit my taxes, chances are that that 'someone' will be black--and a woman too. There are black bankers in Chicago, the deputy police superintendent is black, the general manager of one of the major taxi companies is black. Yet when I came to Chicago in 1933, there were no black taxi drivers."

Blacks have by no means been totally accepted in the upper echelons of big business. Almost all top corporation officers are white, and, for that matter, most are white Anglo-Saxon. "It is more profitable for a young black man to think he can rise to be President of the U.S. than it is for him to think he can become president of a FORTUNE 500 company," says Richard Clarke, the employment recruiter. Many black executives are referred to by other Negroes as H.N.l.C.s (Head Nigger in Charge); they are assigned to public relations jobs or marketing to black customers but are isolated from real decision making. Yet quite a few blacks are climbing up the corporate ladder. In central Indiana, where the Ku Klux Klan once marauded, three blacks have risen to high management positions at the Cummins Engine Co. of Columbus. There are so many black bankers in Atlanta that they scarcely stir much interest any more, though eyebrows lifted when William Allison, a black antipoverty administrator, was recently named to the prestigious board of the Coca-Cola Co. By the latest count, 72 blacks serve as board members of major U.S. corporations, including General Motors, Ford, Chrysler and IBM. Says Bradley Currey Jr., president of Atlanta's Chamber of Commerce: "The trend is clearly away from tokenism."

If tokenism is on the way out in private enterprise, blacks are thoroughly integrated into the public sector. Comprising 11% of the nation's population, they hold 15% of all full-time jobs with the Federal Government. In 1970, 39% of the nation's professionals were employed by federal, state and local government; but 60% of black professionals held such posts. Government programs that proliferated in the 1960s took many blacks up the job escalator into the middle class in half the usual time. "A new breed of cat was produced, the black technocrat," says Robert Coard, director of an antipoverty agency in Boston. William Fuller, who earned $8,100 a year as a grade-school teacher in Portland, Ore., illustrates how fast a black technocrat can ascend. Between 1967 and 1969 he advanced from a planner for a Model Cities program to executive secretary of the State Intergroup Human Relations Commission (salary: $15,500 a year) to state director of compensatory education ($22,500). Today he is paid $31,500 as executive director of the National Advisory Council on Equality of Educational Opportunity.

Another Government route that guarantees entry to the middle class is the military. Not only are members of the armed services paid a middle-class salary after a few years in uniform, but they also receive free on-base housing, medical care and PX privileges. An officer's uniform instantly confers middle-class status--or higher. Air Force Lieut. General Daniel James Jr., top-ranking black in the armed services, seldom wears his civvies. "If I have to go to a meeting," he says, "I just walk in and take my seat, and they know who I am and what I represent. There is less institutionalized racism in the service today than any place else." Blacks now make up 12.6% of the American military; 2.2% of them are officers, up from 1.7% a decade ago. There are twelve black generals in the Army, three in the Air Force, and one black admiral in the Navy; the highest ranking black Marine is a colonel.

In no other occupation have blacks made such strides as in politics. The number of black mayors has increased in the past year from 82 to 108, including Los Angeles' Thomas Bradley, Atlanta's Maynard Jackson and Detroit's Coleman Young. In Mississippi, where any Negro who had the temerity to run for office a decade ago might have been a candidate for a lynching, there are some 200 black elected officials.

With their new affluence, middle-class blacks tend to be conspicuous consumers. "Blacks want the same things as whites," says Francena Thomas, director of minority affairs at Florida International University. "They know what it is not to have and not to be allowed to get." Blacks buy 23% of all shoes sold in the U.S., 25% of all musical cassettes, more than 50% of Scotch whisky. Taking trips to the Caribbean, Mexico, Europe and Africa, they make up one of the fastest growing segments of the travel industry. Trans World Airlines offers special black tours of Europe that feature trips to nonwhite communities, visits to African museums, and cocktail parties with black servicemen and expatriates.

Dora Smith, the first black forewoman at Detroit's Budd Co., a supplier of automotive parts, acknowledges her unabashed, triumphant materialism. When she bought her 1974 Ford Gran Torino, she says, "I used to go out at night just to make sure it was still there. Then when I'd get up the next day, I'd say 'Good morning, car.'" D. Parke Gibson, a New York City marketing analyst who advises corporations on how to tap the $46 billion-a-year black market, says that buying sprees by blacks may be something of a defense mechanism, a compensation for earlier deprivation. "We couldn't live in Hillsborough or Beverly Hills," he says, "but we could have the same kind of color television."

Blacks are moving steadily into better homes, and in some cases second homes. Housing barriers are gradually coming down, and whites are not always fleeing when blacks arrive. Insurance Agent Tom Allen, who bought a house in a largely white suburb of Seattle in 1971, recalls that "15 years ago, you couldn't beg, borrow or steal a place outside the central area even if you had the money. Today, if your money is green enough, you can live anywhere."

Generally, blacks still cluster together, whether in city or suburbs. "I wouldn't think of moving into a white neighborhood unless other blacks were there first," says Sandra Dillard, a reporter for the Denver Post. "You see, we are secure in some ways but not in others." Like other American ethnic groups, blacks also prefer the company of one another, and when they have a community such as Atlanta, it is easy to see why. The city remains the black showcase of the nation. Some of America's wealthiest blacks live in suburbs hardly distinguishable from those inhabited by whites. Few white-owned ante bellum homes are more sumptuous than the black-owned mansions surrounded by dogwood and magnolia trees. Atlanta is said to be the only city in the nation that offers bus tours of the black sections of town.

The new black middle class represents a decisive break with tradition. In a sense, there has always been a black middle class, even during slavery, and it was largely drawn along color lines (see BOOKS). The field hands on the plantations tended to be dark. The house servants, who were better treated and sometimes even taught to read and write, were usually lighter-skinned mulattoes.

After emancipation, the mulattoes assumed the leadership among black Americans and obtained the better jobs, such as they were. But this budding, fragile middle class was scarcely well off. Scorned and isolated by the general white population, its members developed their own institutions with the meager resources available. Inevitably, they re-created a pale imitation of the white world complete with their own coming-out parties and cotillions. They distinguished themselves from the black masses by quitting the Baptist and Methodist churches for the Episcopal, Congregational, Presbyterian or Roman Catholic denominations. Though treated like any other blacks by the white population, they took what comfort they could in their lighter skin. Some Negro colleges even requested photos from applicants to make sure they did not admit too many dark-skinned students.

Reflecting on this marginal middle class from the perspective of the 1950s, Negro Sociologist E. Franklin Frazier wrote a scathing critique of what he called the black bourgeoisie. He derided its typical member as "half a man in a white man's country." The bourgeoisie, he concluded, "suffers from nothingness because when Negroes attain middle-class status, their lives generally lose both content and significance."

It is a different story with today's black middle class. Rather than being formed in segregation, they drew their inspiration from the civil rights movement, which destroyed legal segregation in America. This triumph imbued many blacks with a pride, confidence and political skill they had not known before. It also made them far less color-conscious than their middle-class predecessors. For many, in fact, black became "beautiful." Toughened by struggle, some of these blacks may now be the superachievers of American society. Sociologist Daniel Thompson argues that contemporary middle-class blacks are "105% Americans--the modern translation of the American spirit. The basic standard of success is the black person's ability to operate in both the black and white communities." Leon Chestang, assistant professor at the University of Chicago, believes that the black middle class is finally confronting and resolving its "twoness," that a new bicultural individual is emerging who can span the gulf between the races.

Span--but not necessarily integrate. The tendency among contemporary middle-class blacks is to view integration less as a desired end than as a route to better jobs, housing and education.

The white man is still regarded warily; a black can never be entirely sure what he is up to. Even when he is no longer overtly dominating, he is often thought to be pulling strings behind the scenes. "Many whites are still seen as 'the Man,' " notes Walter Hundley, director of Seattle's Office of Management and Budget. "The really basic control, the entry into professionalism or the middle class is through the white system, and that is the only way you are going to get there." In Phoenix, a black Air Force master sergeant who investigates cases of discrimination in the service asserts: "If you're a black, you can't be yourself and get hired. Whites want to see if you're a good boy first. You have to prove you are not one of the troublemakers, but a black who fits in--and even that doesn't mean they will let you fit in."

For all these suspicions, the new black middle class seems less obsessed with whites than the old bourgeoisie used to be. Says Oscar Weaver Jr., a supermarket owner in Liberty, Fla.: "The black middle class does not regard the white as an enemy but rather as a challenge." In general, blacks can take whites or leave them, and often at quitting time at 5 o'clock, they choose to leave them. As a black personnel recruiter in New York City says, "The only thing that keeps my head intact is the chance to get with other people now and then and talk that talk. It's a mental-health device, to be able to call the Man a m-f once in a while."

To an increasing extent, middle-class blacks and whites enjoy the same kind of after-hours recreation. Nevertheless, at certain times in certain places, the two groups relax in decidedly different ways. With due allowance for literary license, Reporter Evelyn Thompson contrasts black and white parties in Phoenix. "At the white party, the guests always stay standing up, discuss serious topics for maybe three to 15 minutes and then move on to speak with other people. At a black party, you just 'jive' in one big group, putting each other on, trying to top the last line. A white party serves hors d'oeuvres. At black parties, there's food--I mean real food. You fill up a plate of chicken and spareribs and sit down and eat. Whites rarely dance. But dancing is the big reason for going to a black party. You see mamas and papas and soul brothers and sisters all dancing. Black parties are more fun than white parties because they are not a social ritual. They are for having a good time --and whatever you do, nobody will hold it against you the next day."

Though living in two worlds--and sometimes mastering both--can be exhilarating, it can also be agonizing. A certain schizophrenia comes all too easily. "There is no consistency between my social life and my business life," complains Melvyn Huckaby, a Houston oral surgeon who lives among whites and works among blacks. "I'm on the front line all the time. It depresses me." The demands of middle-class life have produced some new strains. Says Thomas Freeman, director of continuing education at Texas Southern University: "All through high school and college I was told that blacks do not commit suicide --they survive. Now we commit suicide, and we go to psychiatrists." The rate of suicide among whites is almost twice that of blacks, but the gap is narrowing.

If a black loses his job and his status, he cannot take refuge in some of the traditional rationalizations. He knows that he does not have the excuse that he was given no opportunity. "As long as you can blame your failures on somebody else, there is a self-regulating system," says a black social psychologist in New York. Without that system, the black man who fails may give way to rage. Belligerence may serve as a cover-up for failure.

Probably the crudest dilemma facing the new middle class is their relationship with blacks left behind in the ghetto. It is natural enough for the middle class to pull out of the slums once they can afford to--just as other ethnic groups have done. But by leaving, they abandon those who cannot escape the ghetto to its more rapacious elements, aggravating the spread of crime and decay. Small wonder that middle-class blacks feel some guilt and ambivalence about fleeing to better neighborhoods.

Middle-class blacks are constantly reminded of their putative responsibilities. "All kinds of wonderful things are happening to me," says Superconsumer Dora Smith, who is reveling in her improved fortunes in life, "but other blacks appear to be jealous." Adds Mary Davis, the Chicago urban planner: "I'm tired of white liberals always reminding you that if you take two steps forward, you always have to remember your un fortunate brethren. Look at white people who live in the rich suburb of Barrington Hills. They don't go down to Cicero and mingle with the blue-collar workers." The Rev. Ralph Abernathy, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, once jokingly reprimanded a black doctor from Detroit for driving a Rolls-Royce. Responded the doctor: "Reverend, I said I would help the poor. I didn't say I was going to be poor."

Blacks newly arrived in the middle class are often too vulnerable economically and psychologically to extend themselves too far for blacks who have been left behind. "They are still aware of the sounds and sights of poverty, of deprivation and oppression," says Atlanta's Mayor Jackson. No less than whites, they are disturbed by black underclass crime, which is no respecter of race. Their homes in the most luxurious suburbs are equipped with burglar alarms and watchdogs. Putting so much trust in education, they fear that lower-class blacks may be a bad influence on their own children. Cornelius Golightly, professor of philosophy at Wayne State University, describes the black middle-class parents' plight: "If my son is to get along well in school, then he has to have a commitment to middle-class values. But if he wants to get along well with his classmates, he may have to go along with the kinds of things that his classmates do. So he has the choice of asking for a certain amount of physical abuse or joining them."

There is some middle-class resentment of the recruiting programs by Government, corporations and colleges that seem to favor the underclass over the upwardly mobile. No one has given more trenchant voice to this point of view than Martin Kilson, professor of government at Harvard. He has charged that college-admissions officials have been discriminating against middle-class black youths in the interest of recruiting poor blacks--an attitude that he says is based on the quixotic notion that the genuine black experience is only to be found in the ghetto. As a result, said Kilson, some of the most prestigious colleges in the country have been accepting ill-prepared militants who divert more qualified students from their studies.

Despite the inevitable tension between blacks who have made it and those who have not, there is ample evidence that middle-class blacks are lending as much of a hand to their less fortunate brothers as most other ethnic groups in the past. Says Francena Thomas, the Florida educator: "Blacks feel that until all blacks have the tools to make it, no black has made it."

Even if they wanted to escape responsibility to the ghetto, middle-class blacks would not be able to do so. Only a few years out of the ghetto themselves, most have left close friends and relatives behind. Beyond that, many middle-class doctors, lawyers, building contractors and storekeepers have clients in the ghetto. Says Robert Perkins, a partner in a New Orleans architectural firm that designs its largest projects for the poor: "I can't forget who I am dealing with since I have to go back to them. They are our clout."

Particularly in the South, many middle-class people continue to live in the ghetto. In Winston-Salem, N.C., Alderman Charles C. Ross, a successful businessman, elects to remain in the neat white clapboard home that he bought in 1947. "Staying here," he explains, "is my way of saying to other blacks: 'You can make it if you try hard enough.' "

That the black middle class will continue to grow is beyond dispute: how fast will depend on the state of the economy and the degree of commitment by white America to making room for blacks. The impact that the black middle class will have on the rest of society is more open to question. Some skeptics doubt that it has the cohesiveness, the unity of purpose to play a commanding role in America. "There are many middle-class blacks," quips Elworth Taylor, director of planning at Chicago's Provident Hospital, "but there is no black middle class." Yet too much should not be expected too soon. Because of its origins in slavery, no other ethnic group has started so far behind in America with so many historical liabilities. For blacks the way up is all the steeper, the climb the more arduous. What is encouraging is that they seem to be making a successful ascent. Thomas Pettigrew, a social psychologist at Harvard, believes that the middle class is gaining the "know-how to pass on from generation to generation." As it does, an increasing number of blacks will meet with whites on equal terms without the insecurities that beset both races. The best guarantee of durable, amicable race relations in America is the continued growth of a strong, self-confident black middle class.

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