ABSTRACT
S cholars disagree about whether the black middle class has received too much or too little attention. Some historians and social and that scientists suggest that it is lower-class blacks who have been ignored and that most studies of African Americans have focused on a culture that represents a black bourgeoisie. Other scholars, however, maintain that little systematic study of the middle class has actually been undertaken. In fact, a strong case can be made for both positions. In the United States economy and society there have been fundamental transformations that have led to the development of a new African-American middle class very different from the “Black Bourgeoisie” described by E. Franklin Frazier in 1957. Consequently, the older studies of black bourgeois culture, plentiful though they may be, are no longer sufficient to describe this new middle class.
