Black America has always felt itself divided into two classes: the mucky-mucks and the folk.

Steven Spielberg's 'The Color Purple' might as well have been about a bunch of dancing eggplants for all it has to say about black history.

'High Cotton' is more conscious of class than 'Black Deutschland.'

When writing on black life, whites have often been unwelcome, usually called upon to give witness or hauled in as the accused.

The demise of Reconstruction had made it hard for blacks to acquire capital or to pass on property to their children. As blacks were driven from all but the most limited spheres of business and political life, the prestige of the professional rose in the black community.

Ellison was prominent on the lecture circuit even in the Black Aesthetic days of the Sixties when his defiantly pro-American and prickly-proud intellectual act met with some hostility.