Militant Blacks?: The Persistent Significance of Class

For most of this century, Black people have been kept on the lowest rungs of the social structure and segregated from the dominant culture. The castelike nature of the racial barrier has frequently allowed white social science to ignore variations in social class, lifestyle, life chances, and social differentiations of any sort within the Black community. Even as the formal legal barriers between races began to erode with the civil rights movement, social science research on Blacks in the 1950s and 1960s most often either ignored class differentiations or focused on lower-class Blacks, often generalizing their conditions to the entire