Middle-class Blacks in a White Society: Prince Hall Freemasonry in America

1976 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 375
Author(s):  
Raymond Wolters ◽  
William A. Muraskin
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Middle Class Blacks

The Achievement Gap: Past, Present & Future

Daedalus ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 140 (2) ◽  
pp. 90-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard E. Nisbett
Keyword(s):  
Academic Achievement ◽  
Elementary Schools ◽  
Achievement Gap ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Later Life ◽  
Black Children ◽  
Class Differences ◽  
Blacks And Whites ◽  
Intellectual Skills ◽  
Middle Class Blacks

The achievement gap between blacks and whites owes nothing to genetics. It is not solely due to discrimination or social-class differences between blacks and whites. It is due in good part to environmental differences between blacks and whites stemming from family, neighborhood, and school socialization factors that are present even for middle-class blacks. The gap is closing slowly, but it could be closed much more rapidly, with interventions both large and small. Preschool programs exist that can produce enormous differences in outcomes in school and in later life. Elementary schools where children spend much more time in contact with the school, and which include upper-middle-class experiences such as visits to museums and dramatic productions, have a major impact on poor black children's academic achievement. Simply convincing black children that their intellectual skills are under their control can have a marked impact.

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Todd M. Michney
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Geographic Mobility ◽  
Black Middle Class ◽  
Predatory Lending ◽  
Elderly Home ◽  
Foreclosure Crisis ◽  
Mount Pleasant ◽  
Bona Fide ◽  
Middle Class Blacks

By the mid-1970s, upwardly mobile middle-class African Americans were increasingly departing neighbourhoods like Glenville, Mount Pleasant, and Lee-Harvard for a number of nearby bona fide suburbs. As a result, such former “surrogate suburbs” began to lose their lustre, although a core (generally elderly), home-owning black middle class still remains in these outlying city neighbourhoods to this day. Starting in the 1990s, Cleveland experienced a wave of predatory lending that culminated in the 2008 foreclosure crisis. Although middle class blacks in Cleveland as elsewhere have been disproportionately impacted by this trend, they have continued their historic strategy of outward geographic mobility in search of acceptable living conditions, even to the farthest metropolitan limits.

Urban Change and Reform Agendas in Cleveland’s Black Middle-Class Neighborhoods, 1950–1980

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Todd M. Michney
Keyword(s):  
Juvenile Delinquency ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Traffic Safety ◽  
Black Middle Class ◽  
Reform Agenda ◽  
Acceptable Quality ◽  
The City ◽  
Middle Class Blacks

This chapter looks at the ambitious reform agenda that black middle-class activist residents went on to mount in these outlying city neighbourhoods, encompassing housing upkeep, business revitalization, traffic safety, trash removal, and efforts to reduce liquor availability, juvenile delinquency, vice, and crime – all in an attempt to maintain what they considered an acceptable quality of life. Perhaps the most ambitious effort along these lines was a venture in which a group of African American investors purchased and renovated the Lee-Harvard Shopping Center, making it during its existence from 1972-1978 the “largest black-owned commercial complex in the nation.” Sometimes these reform efforts involved moralizing or exhibited an explicit class bias; upwardly mobile middle-class blacks did not always recognize that less well-off newcomers were motivated by similar concerns with liveability. In the end, however, their various attempts to take charge of their lives and communities contributed to the long-term vitality of these neighbourhoods and the city as a whole.

Constructing a Positive Intrasection of Race and Class for the 21st Century

2008 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-267 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos R. Mccray
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Race Theory ◽  
Theoretical Concepts ◽  
Potential Barriers ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Middle Class Blacks ◽  
Insight Into

This article attempts to provide some transparency with regard to how the intersection of race and class negatively affects African Americans in their effort to fight for social justice with regard to classism. Based on the explicit historical attempt to definitively make race and class synonymous, such a manufactured intersection is powerfully ingrained within the American psyche, and it has successfully created a quagmire with middle-class Blacks in their effort to fight against class injustice—specifically, those who are discriminated against in our society because of their lack of educational pedigree, economic standing, and job occupation. Thus, this article attempts to infuse sociological theoretical concepts with strands of critical race theory to provide insight into the potential barriers of middle-class Blacks’ amalgamation with African Americans of lower-wealth communities.

scholarly journals Neighborhood Opportunities, Race, and Class: The Black Middle Class and Residential Segregation

2004 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert M. Adelman
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Residential Segregation ◽  
College Graduates ◽  
Census Data ◽  
Metropolitan Areas ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Racial Residential Segregation ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Female Headed Households ◽  
Middle Class Blacks

Racial residential segregation has received considerable attention from social scientists who, in general, have found that African Americans, particularly those in large, northeastern and midwestern metropolitan areas have been highly segregated from whites since at least the beginning of the Great Migration. This analysis combines research on racial residential segregation with research about residential segregation based on social class in order to study the segregation of middle‐class blacks from middle‐class whites. By using Census data that incorporate consistent geographic definitions of Census tracts in 50 U.S. metropolitan areas from 1970 to 1990, I assess change in the levels of residential segregation between middle‐class blacks and middle‐class whites. The index of dissimilarity indicates that while there was a decrease in the segregation of middle‐class blacks from middle‐class whites between 1970 and 1990, in many metropolitan areas this segregation remained high through 1990. The analysis also shows that middle‐class blacks lived in neighborhoods, on average, with considerably more poverty, more boarded‐up homes, more female‐headed households, and fewer college graduates than neighborhoods inhabited by middle‐class whites. Overall, the results suggest that, for the most part, these groups remain residentially separated in U.S. metropolitan areas.

My Story

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeannette Brown
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Public School ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Good Education ◽  
Research Teams ◽  
Pharmaceutical Firms ◽  
White Schools ◽  
White Neighborhood ◽  
Washington Heights ◽  
Middle Class Blacks

Jeannette Brown’s career has included accomplishments in industry, academia, and publishing. Her claim to fame is working in two different pharmaceutical firms, where she was able to contribute her skill to the research teams who produced several marketable drugs. She was also able to mentor minorities to encourage them to enter the field of chemistry, both as part of a corporate effort and as a volunteer. Jeannette Brown was born May 13, 1934, in Fordham Hospital in the Bronx, New York. She was the only child of Ada May Fox and Freddie Brown. She was born in the middle of the Depression, and times were tough. Her father worked a number of jobs in order to feed his family, including shining shoes on the street. Finally, when Jeannette was five, her father got a job as a superintendent in a building in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. This section of Manhattan was just becoming a home for middle-class blacks moving up from Harlem. Since her father was a super, he had a basement apartment in the building. One of the tenants in the house was Dr. Arthur Logan, who became Jeannette’s doctor when she became very ill. Jeannette was in and out of the hospital many times, and she remembers asking Dr. Logan how she could become a doctor. He told her that she would have to study science. Jeannette was only five or six at the time, but that conversation impressed her and she immediately decided to become a scientist. When Jeannette started school at the age of six, she went to the neighborhood public school, which all children did at the time. The children in the school were mostly black, and some of them taunted her because she was interested in being a good student. Her father decided that the only way that she was going to get a good education was for him to try to get a job as a superintendent in a white neighborhood so that Jeannette could go to the mostly white schools.

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