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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."