"Prosperous Blacks in the South, 1790-1880" Loren Schweninger, in The American Historical Review (Feb. 1990), 400 A St. S.E.,Washington, D.C.20003.

Hard as it may be to believe, the South be- fore the Civil War was home to more than a few well-to-do free blacks. In fact, writes Schweninger, a historian at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, the ante- bellum South gave rise to two fairly dis- tinct black elites.
To compound the irony, the wealthiest blacks lived in the Deep S...