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American society has moved away from the two societies, black and white, separate and unequal that highlighted the 1967 Presidential Commission Report – evolving instead into a profusion of worlds reflecting various combinations of races, ethnicities and classes. This paper analyzes two groups – the black middle class and the white underclass – that emerged and grew after the report and defy much of the theorizing sociologists have produced on race and class. It argues that the black middle class and the white underclass reflect “interlocking categories of experience” that are unfamiliar. It encourages a new understanding that captures the reality of these race / class groups.

Writing in 1965, Lewis Coser observed, “The poor, a stratum recruited from heterogeneous origins, belong to a common category by virtue of an essentially passive trait, namely that society reacts to them in a particular manner” (Coser 1965:142). This review examines the “urban underclass,” the latest effort to analyze, categorize, and react to poverty in America. It begins with a discussion of the continuing and pervasive appeal of cultural explanations as the root cause of poverty, perspectives which boast a myriad of scholarly proponents from the right and increasingly from the left. Structural theories, which by contrast find explanation for poverty in various, sometimes conflicting changes in the economy and have an equally loyal following, are also examined. A third, ethnographic approach with antecedents in the prior work of Liebow, Howell, and Stack is explored. This emerging perspective both embraces and eschews different elements of the other two, attempting to ignore labels and understand instead “how people in real communities devise collective responses to their problems” (Sullivan 1989:50). The review suggests that nascent attempts are now in evidence from all sides to produce a common ground—part culture, part structure. But it also concludes that the real advance will come about when theorizing expands beyond the limited arena of the culture versus structure debate.

Over 400,000 blacks left the isolated and economically backward southern United States for the North between 1916 and 1918. This paper analyzes how migrants found out about opportunities in the North and why they left when they did. I examine four lines of communication: (1) labor agents; (2) family and friends; (3) service organizations; and (4) ethnic presses. I conclude that lines of communication occur in successive stages. They influence both the character of migrant populations and the interconnection between the individual decision to migrate and structural migratory pressures. These findings have important implications for the comparative study of internal and international labor migrations over time.

At Dawson II, Dawson College's school for senior citizens, a new project was launched in January 1978. A one‐month program of nonaccredited daytime classes at Broward Community College in Fort Lauderdale was planned for senior students to escape part of the severe winter in Montreal. Accommodation and programming were two aspects of the program that were selected with great care to ensure that as many comforts as possible were met for the participating seniors. Staff personnel accompanying the group consisted of one coordinator and two undergraduate students. An excellent teaching staff was recruited from the continuing education department of Broward Community College. In their spare time, senior students explored the many interesting sights, theaters, beaches, and restaurants of Fort Lauderdale. The month‐long program provided a many‐faceted learning experience for all involved.