African-American middle class

It is a societal level within the African-American community that primarily began to develop in the early 1960s,[1][2] when the ongoing Civil Rights Movement[3] led to the outlawing of de jure racial segregation.

The African American middle class exists throughout the United States, particularly in the Northeast and in the South, with the largest contiguous majority black middle-class neighborhoods being in the Washington, DC suburbs in Maryland.

[4] The African American middle class is also prevalent in the Atlanta, Charlotte, Houston, Memphis, Dallas, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, San Antonio, and Chicago areas.

[12][13] Many African-Americans had limited opportunities for advancement to middle class status prior to 1961 because of racial discrimination, segregation, and the fact that most lived in the rural South.

Homeownership has been crucial in the rise of the black middle class, including the movement of African-Americans to the suburbs, which has also translated into better educational opportunities.

[16] The rise to the middle class for African-Americans occurred throughout the 1960s; however, it leveled off and began to decline in the following decades due to multiple recessions that struck America throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

"[20] A 2016 article entitled "Black Wealth Hardly Exists, Even When You Include NBA, NFL and Rap Stars" related recent findings of the Corporation For Economic Development (CFED) and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), which calculated that "it would take 228 years for the average Black family to amass the same level of wealth the average white family holds today in 2016...

[24] In a project conducted by the University of Washington's Civil Rights and Labor History Program in 2010, it was found that records of more than 400 properties in Seattle suburbs alone contained now-illegal discriminatory language that formerly excluded several ethnic groups.

For example, in Atlanta in the 1980s, a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles by investigative reporter Bill Dedman showed that banks would often lend to lower-income whites but not to middle-income or upper-income blacks.

[28] The use of blacklists is a related mechanism also used by redliners to keep track of groups, areas, and people that the discriminating party feels should be denied business or aid or other transactions.

Many are former manufacturing suburbs with weak tax bases, poor municipal services, and high levels of debt, compromising the secure middle-class lifestyle of its African-American inhabitants.

[36] By attending spatially segregated school systems, children of the black middle class do not have access to the same educational and employment opportunities as their white counterparts.

Some researchers[40] also hypothesize that in some cases, minorities, especially African American students, may stop trying in school because they do not want to be accused of "acting white" by their peers.

As some researchers point out, minority students may feel little motivation to do well in school because they do not believe it will pay off in the form of a better job or upward social mobility.