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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.