A classic analysis of the Black middle class studies its origin and development, accentuating its behavior, attitudes, and values during the 1940s and 1950s.

When it was first published in 1957, E. Franklin Frazier's Black Bourgeoisie was simultaneously reviled and revered--revered for its skillful dissection of one of America's most complex communities, reviled for daring to cast a critical eye on a section of black society that had achieved the trappings of the white, bourgeois ideal.

The author traces the evolution of this enigmatic class from the segregated South to the...