THE new factor in U.S. race relations and politics that has come to be known as backlash is more than merely the reaction of some white people to Negro rioting or cries of "black power." The attitude of many white Americans is influenced by the belief that the Negro has made great gains in a relatively short time, and that he now would do better to stop agitating and consolidate what he has won. At the same time, much of the new black militancy is a result of frustration over what many Negroes consider their snail's pace of progress. Beneath the passion and the rhetoric, these two opposing views pose a root question about the state of the Negro in the U.S. today: just what advances have—and have not—been made by the nation's 21 million Negroes?
The fact is that Negroes have progressed farther and faster than any minority in the history of the U.S., or almost any other nation. Considering that the drive for full equality did not really begin until after World War II and did not achieve the sanction of law until the Supreme Court struck down the old "separate but equal" doctrine in 1954, the gains have been nothing less than remarkable. Though whites still earn far more than Negroes ($7,170 per family compared with $3,971), Negro income has risen 24% since 1960 v. only 14% for whites. Today, just over one in five Negro families earns more than $7,000 yearly, a figure that puts them firmly in the middle class. The Negro has enthusiastically participated in the U.S.'s steadily increasing material prosperity: nine out of ten Negro families own one (or more) television sets, two-thirds have automatic washers and more than half own cars. Negroes own 50,000 businesses and, while most of them are small groceries, beauty parlors or mortuaries, the nation has about 40 Negro millionaires and many thousands who are more than comfortably affluent.
Practically all of the gains have been made by the growing Negro middle class, which still constitutes a minority of the Negro population. That is the heart of the problem, for it leaves behind the lower-income, semiliterate Negroes, notably the families that are below the Government's $3,000-a-year poverty line. This class contains 60% of all the nation's Negro youths, the very people who are in the vanguard of desire and disorder. While the income of the middle-class Negro rises, that of this great mass of Negroes is actually declining. During the 1960s, median family income for Negroes has dropped from $3,897 to $3,803 in Los Angeles' Watts, from $4,346 to $3,729 in Cleveland's Hough district.