Black Picket Fences: Privilege & Peril among the Black Middle Class

First published in 1999, Mary Pattillo's Black Picket Fences explores an American demographic group too often ignored by both scholars and the media: the black middle class. Nearly fifteen years later, this book remains a groundbreaking study of a group still underrepresented in the academic and public spheres. The result of living for three years in "Groveland," a black middle-class neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, Black Picket Fences explored both the advantages the black middle clas...