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" Locating the Black Middle Class: "
St. Julien, Danielle E.
Ortiz, Stephen R.
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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1107671
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TLpq2453674007
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| Main Entry
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Ortiz, Stephen R.
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St. Julien, Danielle E.
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| Title & Author
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Locating the Black Middle Class:\ St. Julien, Danielle E.Ortiz, Stephen R.
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| College
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State University of New York at Binghamton
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| Date
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2020
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| student score
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2020
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Page No
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254
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| Abstract
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Locating the Black Middle Class explores how early-1970s national media coverage of upwardly mobile African Americans influenced both Nixon-era federal policy and United States political culture. To identify the political context that fostered the news stories, the project relies largely on Johnson and Nixon administration archival records. It then catalogs and analyzes stories on the black middle class appearing in national news periodicals, major African-American newspapers, and intellectual and public policy magazines to assess the influence of these ideas on American politicians and political culture. Based on these sources, the dissertation argues that between 1969 and 1974 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. Although President Lyndon B. Johnson first referenced a growing black middle class to defend federal antipoverty programs, during Nixon’s presidency, neoconservatives cultivated a political narrative affirming that liberals purposefully hid news of a growing and economically-secure black middle class. Nixon used these claims to justify the dismantling of Johnson’s antipoverty agency to his cabinet and to American voters. Major news outlets, in search of news stories to commemorate major civil rights milestones, affirmed neoconservative arguments of a large, secure black middle class despite ample statistical evidence racial liberals offered to refute those claims. This project builds on modern conservative historiography by contributing new neoconservative missives otherwise overlooked by intellectual and political histories of these influential thinkers. It also explains how conservative policymakers deployed the ideas contained within these works to challenge the popularity of Johnson’s antipoverty crusade and undermine American voters’ faith in postwar liberalism.
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African American studies
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Demography
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History
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Political science
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