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Middle-class blacks are constantly reminded of their putative responsibilities. "All kinds of wonderful things are happening to me," says Superconsumer Dora Smith, who is reveling in her improved fortunes in life, "but other blacks appear to be jealous." Adds Mary Davis, the Chicago urban planner: "I'm tired of white liberals always reminding you that if you take two steps forward, you always have to remember your un fortunate brethren. Look at white people who live in the rich suburb of Barrington Hills. They don't go down to Cicero and mingle with the blue-collar workers." The Rev. Ralph Abernathy, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, once jokingly reprimanded a black doctor from Detroit for driving a Rolls-Royce. Responded the doctor: "Reverend, I said I would help the poor. I didn't say I was going to be poor."
Blacks newly arrived in the middle class are often too vulnerable economically and psychologically to extend themselves too far for blacks who have been left behind. "They are still aware of the sounds and sights of poverty, of deprivation and oppression," says Atlanta's Mayor Jackson. No less than whites, they are disturbed by black underclass crime, which is no respecter of race. Their homes in the most luxurious suburbs are equipped with burglar alarms and watchdogs. Putting so much trust in education, they fear that lower-class blacks may be a bad influence on their own children. Cornelius Golightly, professor of philosophy at Wayne State University, describes the black middle-class parents' plight: "If my son is to get along well in school, then he has to have a commitment to middle-class values. But if he wants to get along well with his classmates, he may have to go along with the kinds of things that his classmates do. So he has the choice of asking for a certain amount of physical abuse or joining them."
There is some middle-class resentment of the recruiting programs by Government, corporations and colleges that seem to favor the underclass over the upwardly mobile. No one has given more trenchant voice to this point of view than Martin Kilson, professor of government at Harvard. He has charged that college-admissions officials have been discriminating against middle-class black youths in the interest of recruiting poor blacks—an attitude that he says is based on the quixotic notion that the genuine black experience is only to be found in the ghetto. As a result, said Kilson, some of the most prestigious colleges in the country have been accepting ill-prepared militants who divert more qualified students from their studies.
Despite the inevitable tension between blacks who have made it and those who have not, there is ample evidence that middle-class blacks are lending as much of a hand to their less fortunate brothers as most other ethnic groups in the past. Says Francena Thomas, the Florida educator: "Blacks feel that until all blacks have the tools to make it, no black has made it."