Certain People: America's Black Elite

Certain People is an extensively researched, fascinating, and intimate portrait of America’s black elite which reveals the rarely publicized world of the heritage, conflicts, and characteristics of the black upper class.

Like its white counterpart, the black elite is divided into the nouveaux riches and the Old Guard. Birmingham’s close-ups of the lives of two Chicago multimillionaires—John H. Johnson, president and executive officer of the Johnson Publishing Company, publisher of Ebony and ...