RACES: America's Rising Black Middle Class

Black militancy. Black rage. Black separatism. Black crime. For years, these have been the catchwords that have discomfited and even chilled white Americans, for they imply an alien and hostile race scarcely at home in a land where it has lived for some 350 years. But another phrase may well become more familiar in the 1970s: Black middle class.

Beneath the more dramatic and widely reported clashes and confrontations, a reassuring process has been under way for the past decade. With little fanfare, without the rest of the society quite realizing...