DURHAM: CAPITAL OF THE BLACK MIDDLE CLASS
E. Franklin Frazier
Durham offers none of the color and creative life we find among Negroes in New York City. It is a city of fine homes, exquisite churches, and middle class respectability. It is not the place where men write and dream; but a place where black men calculate and work. No longer can men say that the Negro is lazy and shiftless and a consumer. He has gone to work. He is a producer. He is respectable. He has a middle class.
Many who have been interested in the Negro's progress, and especially his critics, have bemoaned the fact that the Negro has had no middle class. Negro society has been divided chiefly into the professional and the working classes. The working class has not consisted of skilled artisans but unskilled laborers and domestic servants. While the professional class has imitated many of the traits of the white middle class, they have regarded themselves as essentially an aristocracy. The working classes have been execrated by both white and colored for their love of pleasure. So in neither of these classes have the Negroes developed a middle class economic outlook. We can discount the fanciful schemes for getting rich and the activities of the swindler. Even small retail stores operated by Negroes are conspicuously absent from Negro communities. But the Negro is at last developing a middle class, and its main center is in Durham. As we read the lives of the men in Durham who have established the enterprises there, we find stories parallelling the most amazing accounts of the building of American fortunes. We find them beginning their careers without much formal education and practising the old-fashioned virtues of the old middle class. Their lives are as free from the Negro's native love of leisure and enjoyment of life
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