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Oddly, the stereotype of the less qualified black is sometimes shared by blacks. The feeling is summed up in a wry phrase: "The white man's ice is | colder." Kenneth Glover, 37, managing director for municipal finance at the Manhattan branch of Drexel Burnham Lambert Inc., recalls prospecting a well- to-do black executive as a potential client. After a telephone conversation, Glover invited the prospect to a face-to-face meeting. It broke off after only ten minutes. Later the client phoned and asked for his account to be transferred to a white investment adviser.
The going gets especially tough for blacks who have climbed near the top of the ladder. There they frequently encounter the so-called glass ceiling: they can see the next step up, but they never get invited to take it. "You have to be twice as good to get the job you want," says Robert Lee Dean, 48, a $50,000-a-year maintenance planner at a Boise Cascade plant in Jackson, Ala. About four months ago, Jerry O. Williams, 50, who seemed poised to become the first black chief executive officer of a FORTUNE 500 company, resigned as president of AM International, a Chicago-based manufacturer of office- automation equipment. His reason: it was taking too long for him to be promoted to the top slot.
Frustrated by the slow pace of change in corporate bureaucracies, many black entrepreneurs have struck out on their own. An example is Peggie Henderson, 40, who co-founded two clothing stores in Tunica, Miss., in 1979. Last year her family, using their own funds and $147,000 in state loans, started the Southern Group, Inc. At first the company provided two disparate services, duplicating videocassettes and distributing chemical cleaners. Recently it expanded into production. A small assembly line now turns out all-purpose cleaner and dishwashing liquid at the rate of about 50 bottles a minute. The Southern Group currently employs about twelve workers. By later this year Henderson hopes to have 150 workers on-line. Says she: "The only way the conditions of black people will improve is for us to provide jobs for ourselves. I think it's going to get worse as far as white people hiring blacks, unless we are super, super people."
Charles Blair, 41, can remember the vacation car trips of his childhood in the 1950s. Before the family took off, his father would carefully map out in advance how far they would get on each tank of gas. He had to be sure they didn't run low on a stretch of road where the service stations wouldn't sell to blacks. Those days are just a memory now -- but a memory Blair wants to pass on to his two teenage sons, to help them understand the hurdles he faced in launching his own management-consulting firm in Indianapolis. "I just try to give them some sense of history," he says. And another thing. "I teach them not to feel inferior. Any barriers that seem to exist -- they can find a way to do something about them."
If the good news is that middle-class blacks are in many ways indistinguishable from middle-class whites, that's the bad news too. Like other ethnic and racial groups, upwardly mobile African Americans often fear that assimilation will mean the loss of identity. In a nation where for centuries being black almost always meant being poor, prosperity itself can seem like a departure from tradition.