Aristocrats of Color: South and North The Black Elite, 1880-1920

Abstract

1 DISCUSS CLASS IN AMERICA IS TO VENTURE INTO AN AREA fraught with perils. It may well be that is the toughest, slipperiest opponent the lexicon; all the more so when applied to AfroAmerican society. But failure to consider class divisions the black community would contribute to what Bayard Rustin once termed the sentimental notion of black solidarity2 and to the perpetuation of the myth that black society is a homogeneous mass without significant and illuminating distinctions prestige, attitudes, behavior, culture, power, and wealth. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries black Americans challenged the Jim Crow way of viewing black society, which held that among blacks there were no distinctions whatever between the industrious and idle, the refined and the vulgar, the educated gentleman or lady and the noisiest tough of the slums.'3 Contrary to the notion that all Negroes are alike, they argued, blacks were, fact, markedly different in lineage, education, inspiration and character.'4 In the generation following Reconstruction blacks engaged lively and frequent discussions regarding the significance and implications of the evolving social gradations the black community. They spoke terms of a large lower class, a small but growing middle class, and a miniscule upper class. The attention I Michael B. Katz, Comment on Edward Pessen, Social Structure and Politics American History, American Historical Review, LXXXVII (December 1982), 1331. 2 Bayard Rustin, Down the Line: The Collected Writings ofBayard Rustin (Chicago, 1971),