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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.