The African-American upper class is a social class that consists of African-American individuals who have high disposable incomes and high net worth. The group includes highly paid white-collar professionals such as academics, engineers, lawyers, accountants, doctors, politicians, business executives, venture capitalists, CEOs, celebrities, entertainers, entrepreneurs and heirs. This social class, sometimes referred to as the black upper class, the black upper middle class or black elite, represents 12 percent of the total black population in the United States.
This group of black people has a history of organizations and activities that distinguish it from other classes within the black community, as well as from the white upper class. Many of these traditions, which have persisted for several generations, are discussed in Lawrence Otis Graham's 2000 book, Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class. Scholarship on this class from a sociological perspective is generally traced to E. Franklin Frazier's Black Bourgeoisie (first edition in English in 1957 translated from the 1955 French original).
Today, the African American upper class exists throughout the United States, particularly in the Northeast and in the South, with the largest contiguous majority black high income neighborhoods being in the Washington, DC metropolitan area, particularly in Prince George's County and Charles County. Majority black high income neighborhoods are also found in the New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Memphis, San Antonio, Dallas, and Atlanta metropolitan areas.
Historical background
When enslaved Africans were brought to the Americas in the 17th and 18th centuries, there began to be mixed-race children of African and European descent in the Americas. Then called "mulattoes," they were sometimes not enslaved by their white slave-holding fathers and comprised a large part of the free black population in the South. In addition, numbers of Africans escaped to freedom during the American Revolution. Others were manumitted by their enslavers. The free black community in the US had therefore increased considerably by 1800, and although most of them were very poor, some were able to own farmland or to learn mechanical or artistic trades.
Some people escaped slavery and served in the American Civil War (1861–1865) for the Union and after the war, an extremely small number of freed people along the Georgia coast received and a mule, which contributed to land ownership among blacks following the emancipation of slaves.
Following the outbreak of the Civil War, abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass claimed that enlisting Black soldiers would strengthen the North in winning the war and would be a significant step forward in the fight for equal rights: "Once let the Black man get upon his person the brass letters, U.S.; let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket," Douglass said, "and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship." This is just what President Lincoln feared: He was concerned that arming African Americans, particularly former or escaped slaves, might lead to the loyal border states declaring independence. As a result, the Union's chances of winning the war would be slim to none.
Other former slaves, often mixed-race former house slaves who shared ancestry with their onetime owners and had acquired marketable skills such as cooking and tailoring, worked in domestic fields or were able to open small businesses such as restaurants and catering firms. Some free blacks in the North also founded small businesses and even newspapers. They were able to get a head-start on the blacks who were essentially still enslaved by their lack of access to wealth accumulation, particularly when it came to owning their own land.