But the 1950s and early 1960s saw the rise of a burgeoning black middle class—as Thomas Sowell points out, “from 1954 to 1964 . . . the number of blacks in professional, technical, and similar high-level positions more than doubled. In other kinds of occupations, the advance of blacks was even greater during the 1940s—when there was little or no civil rights policy—than during the 1950s when the civil rights revolution was in its heyday.”
