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"Middle class African Americans Social conditions."
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As Karyn R. Lacy's innovative work in the suburbs of Washington, DC, reveals, there is a continuum of middle-classness among blacks, ranging from lower-middle class to middle-middle class to upper-middle class. Focusing on the latter two, Lacy explores an increasingly important social and demographic group: middle-class blacks who live in middle-class suburbs where poor blacks are not present. These \"blue-chip black\" suburbanites earn well over fifty thousand dollars annually and work in predominantly white professional environments. Lacy examines the complicated sense of identity that individuals in these groups craft to manage their interactions with lower-class blacks, middle-class whites, and other middle-class blacks as they seek to reap the benefits of their middle-class status.
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The Kings of Mississippi : race, religious education, and the making of a middle-class black family in the segregated South
\"The King family was a 20th century anomaly - a middle class black family living in rural Mississippi. Academic studies, mainstream writing, and anecdotes corroborate the same reality - that blacks living in the historic South experienced deleterious conditions due to racism, segregation, and de jure as well as de facto discrimination. Whether prior to or during Reconstruction or as a result of Jim Crow, they were subjected to profound and unrelenting economic, political, legal, and social oppression, often accompanied by the threat of violence, particularly lynching. How did black families navigate these systemic, oppressive conditions daily? What strategies did they use? And how could becoming middle class be possible? This book presents the lives and experiences of seven generations of a black family that originated in Mississippi. Limited mixed-methodological, multi- disciplinary research has been performed on this topic. This book is one response to this omission. We rely on sociology and ecology (or a socio-ecological lens) as well their own voices to examine how race, religion, education and their intersection as a familial ethos influenced economic and non-economic outcomes of the King family. Empirical reports document the context\"-- Provided by publisher.
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To Live an Antislavery Life
In this study of antebellum African American print culture in transnational perspective, Erica L. Ball explores the relationship between antislavery discourse and the emergence of the northern black middle class. Through innovative readings of slave narratives, sermons, fiction, convention proceedings, and the advice literature printed in forums like Freedom's Journal, the North Star, and the Anglo-African Magazine, Ball demonstrates that black figures such as Susan Paul, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Delany consistently urged readers to internalize their political principles and to interpret all their personal ambitions, private familial roles, and domestic responsibilities in light of the freedom struggle. Ultimately, they were admonished to embody the abolitionist agenda by living what the fugitive Samuel Ringgold Ward called an \"antislavery life.\" Far more than calls for northern free blacks to engage in what scholars call \"the politics of respectability,\" African American writers characterized true antislavery living as an oppositional stance rife with radical possibilities, a deeply personal politics that required free blacks to transform themselves into model husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, self-made men, and transnational freedom fighters in the mold of revolutionary figures from Haiti to Hungary. In the process, Ball argues, antebellum black writers crafted a set of ideals-simultaneously respectable and subversive-for their elite and aspiring African American readers to embrace in the decades before the Civil War. Published in association with the Library Company of Philadelphia's Program in African American History. A Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication.
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The new noir : race, identity, and diaspora in Black suburbia
\"The expansion of the black middle class and the unprecedented increase in the number of immigrants among them since the 1960s has transformed the black cultural geography of New York. In The new noir, urban sociologist Orly Clerge uncovers the complex social worlds of an extraordinary generation of black middle class adults from different corners of the African Diaspora. Clerge demonstrates that the black middle class' ongoing ties with the American and Global South has influenced the local businesses, organizations, and kitchen tables of their suburbs. With particular attention to the largest black ethnic groups in the U.S.--Black Americans, Jamaicans, and Haitians--Clerge takes us on a journey into the hidden places on Queens and Long Island and reveals the ways in which region and nationality shape how the black middle class negotiates diasporic encounters, the politics of blackness, and class mobility. In their social interactions with one another and in everyday life, they stir up local social hierarchies and cultivate a spectrum of black identities, which help them cultivate belonging in a changing 21st global city. As the first ethnographic work on the multiethnic black middle class, The New Noir is a groundbreaking exploration of race, place, and immigrant experience today\"--Provided by publisher.
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No There There
Challenged by Ku Klux Klan action in the '20s, labor protests culminating in a general strike in the '40s, and the rise of the civil rights and black power struggles of the '60s, Oakland, California, seems to encapsulate in one city the broad and varied sweep of urban social movements in twentieth-century America. Taking Oakland as a case study of urban politics and society in the United States, Chris Rhomberg examines the city's successive episodes of popular insurgency for what they can tell us about critical discontinuities in the American experience of urban political community.
eBook
Black silent majority : the Rockefeller drug laws and the politics of punishment
\"Often seen as a political sop to the racial fears of white voters, aggressive policing and draconian sentencing for illegal drug possession and related crimes have led to the imprisonment of millions of African Americans--far in excess of their representation in the population as a whole. Michael Javen Fortner [argues] that these punitive policies also enjoyed the support of many working-class and middle-class blacks, who were angry about decline and disorder in their communities. [His book examines] the role African Americans played in creating today's system of mass incarceration\"--Dust jacket flap.
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Private Politics and Public Voices
This political history of middle-class African American women during
World War I focuses on their patriotic activity and social work. Nearly 200,000
African American men joined the Allied forces in France. At home, black clubwomen
raised more than $125 million in wartime donations and assembled comfort
kits for black soldiers, with chocolate, cigarettes, socks, a bible, and
writing materials. Given the hostile racial climate of the day, why did black women
make considerable financial contributions to the American and Allied war effort?
Brown argues that black women approached the war from the nexus of the private
sphere of home and family and the public sphere of community and labor activism.
Their activism supported their communities and was fueled by a personal attachment
to black soldiers and black families. Private Politics and Public Voices follows
their lives after the war, when they carried their debates about race relations into
public political activism.
eBook
Down the up staircase : three generations of a Harlem family
\"Down the Up Staircase tells the history of three generations of a black middle-class family against the backdrop of the three-story brownstone at 411 Convent Avenue in the Sugar Hill section of Harlem. The home once belonged to its patriarch, George Edmund Haynes, a migrant from Pine Bluff, Arkansas, who went on to become the first African American to earn a PhD at Columbia University and found the National Urban League. He was the first prominent black economist in the country, the first to predict the great sweeping migration of blacks from the rural South to the urban North, a power broker of the Harlem Renaissance, and the first black to serve in a federal sub-cabinet post, where he mobilized the new Black migrants for the war effort. His wife, Elizabeth Ross Haynes, was a noted children's author of the period and a prominent social scientist. Yet these early advances and gains provided little anchor to the succeeding generations. Their son had dreamed of becoming an engineer but spent his entire career as a parole officer in the Bronx. Their eldest grandson graduated from the prestigious Horace Mann High School but spent much of his adult life in and out of drug rehabilitation clinics, psychiatric hospitals, and the streets. Their second grandson was slain on the streets of the Bronx during his last semester of college, at age twenty-three. Only the youngest grandson--the book's author, Bruce Haynes--was able to build on the gains of his forefathers. Haynes brings sociological insight to a familiar American tale, one where the notion of social mobility and black middle class is a tenuous term\"--Provided by publisher.
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Places of their own
On Melbenan Drive just west of Atlanta, sunlight falls onto a long row of well-kept lawns. Two dozen homes line the street; behind them wooden decks and living-room windows open onto vast woodland properties. Residents returning from their jobs steer SUVs into long driveways and emerge from their automobiles. They walk to the front doors of their houses past sculptured bushes and flowers in bloom. For most people, this cozy image of suburbia does not immediately evoke images of African Americans. But as this pioneering work demonstrates, the suburbs have provided a home to black residents in increasing numbers for the past hundred years—in the last two decades alone, the numbers have nearly doubled to just under twelve million. Places of Their Own begins a hundred years ago, painting an austere portrait of the conditions that early black residents found in isolated, poor suburbs. Andrew Wiese insists, however, that they moved there by choice, withstanding racism and poverty through efforts to shape the landscape to their own needs. Turning then to the 1950s, Wiese illuminates key differences between black suburbanization in the North and South. He considers how African Americans in the South bargained for separate areas where they could develop their own neighborhoods, while many of their northern counterparts transgressed racial boundaries, settling in historically white communities. Ultimately, Wiese explores how the civil rights movement emboldened black families to purchase homes in the suburbs with increased vigor, and how the passage of civil rights legislation helped pave the way for today's black middle class. Tracing the precise contours of black migration to the suburbs over the course of the whole last century and across the entire United States, Places of Their Own will be a foundational book for anyone interested in the African American experience or the role of race and class in the making of America's suburbs.
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