![]() ![]() Here is a short list available in the Jean Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference Division: This is a fascinating topic within the history of Black people in America, and if you are interested in learning more there are plenty of resources at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture for you to explore. They were doctors, educators, entrepreneurs, and belonged to exclusive social organizations such as “The Social Circle”. Members of this small community attended schools such as Oberlin, Fisk, Harvard, and Yale. To be part of the Black elite meant not only wealth, but also education, influence, and political connections. But even exceptional blacks were considered inferior to whites.” The discussion of a Black upper-class can be incredibly complex, considering the inclusion of race and the fact that many of these families, even with considerable wealth, were formerly enslaved or only a generation removed from slavery. Rather, the tendency was to classify blacks as "good Negroes" and "bad Negroes" or to designate, for one reason or another, certain black individuals and families as exceptions. As Gatewood aptly describes, “Since most whites in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries viewed blacks as a homogenous mass of degraded people, they were rarely inclined to think in terms of stratified black society. This omission is in large part due to the stereotypes of Black people during the time of Reconstruction. In spite of the popularity of books such as Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class, Black high society in the 19th century is still an understudied piece of American history. Gatewood in his book, Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880-1920. Only a few years after Emancipation, the Gilded Age also ushered in the new Black elite, also known as “the colored aristocracy,” “black 400,” ‘upper tens,” and “best society,” as noted by Willard B. history saw the end of Reconstruction, the expansion westward, and the massive accumulation of wealth by a small group of the population due to industrialization and the growth of the railroads. The era known as the Gilded Age is dated between the 1870s and the 1890s. Peggy’s story gives us a glimpse into this lesser known history of America’s Black aristocracy. In the series, the character Peggy Scott is an aspiring writer and the daughter of a successful Black pharmacist who lives in a thriving Black community in Brooklyn. The recent popularity of HBO’s The Gilded Age has sparked a growing interest in the story of the Black elite. Peterson's book, Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City, describes the dawn of the Black upper class during the mid-to-late 19th century. Self-consciously identifying as an aristocracy, determined to find an economic niche for themselves despite the city’s rigorous competitiveness, and eager to prove to the world that they too could achieve, this new generation of the black elite thrived. For a fraction of New York’s black community, the late 1840s and 1850s were years of phenomenal success. ![]()
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