World War II, a trivial five percent of black men were engaged in white-collar work of any kind, and six out of ten African-American women were employed as domestics.
In 1940 there were only 1,000 practicing African-American lawyers; by 1995 there were over 32,000, about four percent of all attorneys.
Today almost three-quarters of African-American families have incomes above the government poverty line. Many are in the middle class, according to one useful index—earning double the government poverty level; in 1995 this was $30,910 for a two-parent family with two children and $40,728 for a two-parent family with four children. Only one black family in 100 enjoyed a middle-class income in 1940; by 1995 it was 49 in 100. And more than 40 percent of black households also own their homes. That s a huge change.
The typical white family still earns a lot more than the black family because it is more likely to collect two paychecks. But if we look only at married couples—much of the middle class—the white-black income gap shrinks to 13 percent. Much of that gap can be explained by the smaller percentage of blacks with college degrees, which boost wages, and the greater concentration of blacks in the South, where wages tend to be lower.
Blacks are moving to the suburbs. Following the urban riots of the mid-1960s, the presidential Kerner Commission14 concluded that the nation s future was menaced by “accelerating segregation”—black central cities and whites outside the core. That segregation might well blow the country apart, it said.
It s true that whites have continued to leave inner cities for the suburbs, but so, too, have blacks. The number of black suburban dwellers in the last generation has almost tripled to 10.6 million. In 1970 metropolitan Atlanta, for example, 27 percent of blacks lived in the suburbs with 85 percent of whites. By 1990, 64 percent of blacks and 94 percent of whites resided there.
This is not phony integration, with blacks moving from one all-black neighborhood into another. Most of the movement has brought African-Americans into neighborhoods much less black15 than those they left behind, thus increasing integration. By 1994 six in ten whites reported that they lived in neighborhoods with blacks.
Residential patterns do remain closely connected to race. However, neighborhoods have become more racially mixed, and residential segregation has been decreasing.
Bigotry has declined. Before World Was ft, Gunnar Myrdal16 roamed the South researching An American Dilemma, the now-classic book that documented17 the chasm between the nation s ideals and its racial practices, hi one small Southern city, he kept asking whites how he could find “Mr. Jim Smith,” an African-American who was principal of a black high school. No one seemed to know who he was. After he finally found Smith, Myrdal was told that he should have just asked for “Jim.” That s how great was white aversion to dignifying African-Americans with “Mr.” Or “Mrs.”
