American Black Upper Class

The African-American upper class consists of African-American engineers, lawyers, accountants, doctors, politicians, business executives, venture capitalists, CEOs, celebrities, entertainers, entrepreneurs and heirs who have incomes amounting to $200,000 or more. This class, sometimes referred to as the black upper class, the African-American upper middle class or black elite, represents less than 1 percent of the total black population in the United States. This group of African Americans 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).

When African slaves were brought to the Americas in the 17th and 18th centuries and sold into slavery, 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.

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