No matter how much respect, no matter how much recognition, whites show towards me, as far as I’m concerned, as long as it is not shown to every one of our people in this country, it doesn’t exist for me. MALCOLM X (1964) THERE has not been a time in the history of black people in this country when the quantity of politicians and intellectuals was so great, yet the quality of both groups has been so low. Just when one would have guessed that black America was flexing its political and intellectual muscles, rigor mortis seems to have set in. How do we account for the absence of the Frederick Douglasses, Sojourner Truths, Martin Luther King, Jrs., Malcolm Xs, and Fannie Lou Hamers in our time? Why hasn’t black America produced intellectuals of the caliber of W. E. B. Du Bois, Anna Cooper, E. Franklin Frazier, Oliver Cox, and Ralph Ellison in the past few decades? A serious response to these perplexing questions requires subtle inquiry into the emergence of the new black middle class—its content and character, aspirations and anxieties, orientations and opportunities.
