7) How did the growth of the Black middle class impact the literature of the period?

 

As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-conscious Black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century. Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular American literature, which middle-class Black writers often imitated, to a real-world sociopolitical agenda 

Over the past several decades, the United States has undergone a remarkable transformation, with income growth stalling for the middle class while the incomes of those at the top continued to rise dramatically compared to the rest of the working population. Between 1979 and 2007, the last year before the Great Recession, median family income rose by 35 percent, while incomes for those at the 99th percentile rose by 278 percent. Families in the middle class have also pulled away from those at the bottom, but achieved these modest income gains only by working longer hours, increasing their labor supply—particularly among wives and mothers—and increasing household debts to maintain consumption as wages failed to keep pace with inflation.

For most economists, however, the concepts of "middle class" or even inequality have not had a prominent place in our thinking about how an economy grows. This, however, is beginning to change. One reason for the change is that the levels of inequality and the financial stress on the middle class have risen dramatically and have reached levels that motivate a closer investigation.   Even though the facts say differently, such perceptions partially rest on the visible progress that African Americans have made over the last half-century. The upward strides of many African Americans into the middle class have given the illusion that race cannot be the barrier that some make it out to be. The reality, however, is that even the black and white middle classes remain separate and unequal.

African-American literature explores the issues of freedom and equality long denied to Blacks in the United States, along with further themes such as African-American culture, racism, religion, slavery, a sense of home, segregation, migration, feminism, and more.  A classic American success story, Up from Slavery solidified Washington's reputation as the most eminent African American of the new century. Yet Washington's primacy was soon challenged. In his landmark collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, a professor of sociology at Atlanta University, disputed the main principle of Washington's political program, the idea that voting and civil rights were less important to Black progress than acquiring property and achieving economic self-sufficiency. Unlike Washington, who foresaw the steady obliteration of racial prejudice and discrimination, Du Bois prophesied in the opening lines of The Souls of Black Folk: "The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line."