“It’s Nice to See That Society Can Still Function Despite All the Things That Have Gone Wrong”: 1970s Politics, Commemoration, and the Uses of Black Social Mobility

Between 1973 and 1974, national news outlets such as New York Times, TIME, Washington Post, and Ebony published several high-profile articles extolling the growth of the African-American middle class. Despite the celebratory tone in these “rags-to-riches" pieces, many journalists hinted at vociferous debates over the demographic group’s size and the conditions which produced its recent growth. My research studies these publications to describe why and how period political and cultural commentators used imagery of the Black middle class and the consequences of these uses. I argue that racial liberal and neoconservative social scientists transformed the Black middle class into a contested political symbol to debate the effectiveness of the Johnson administration’s antipoverty programs and the prudence of postwar liberalism more generally. President Nixon's January 1973 announced closing of key Great Society programs prompted another round of debates among the nation's leading intellectuals on the relationship between Black social mobility and these agencies. Those disagreements spilled into the national media where journalists searching for ways to commemorate the 1960s Black Freedom Struggle transformed the demographic group into a cultural symbol celebrating “normative American” values as articulated by historian Andrew Hartmann. The media’s emphasis on individual merit and hard work in their human-interest pieces obscured both the role of federal action in facilitating Black economic gains and the systemic racism that still threatened it. This poster will use several visual elements such as Census/Labor statistics and magazine covers to illustrate the lines of debate that emerged on the subject. With its treatment of middle-class Blacks as contested political symbol, this work contributes to those late 20th century histories which seek to upend the “rise of the Right” narrative by demonstrating instances of ideological concurrence hiding beneath the façade of conflict between liberal and conservative thinkers.