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."