Pamela Gordon sighs as she recalls how her parents came to Chicago in the 1950s from Mississippi, following the “Great Migration” of African-Americans to the industrial Midwest.
“They were at the median, but coming from the south, they considered they were doing well,” she says. “My father worked at the National Can factory and my mother was a beautician. They had enough money to pay the mortgage, to afford a Cadillac, and they took us out once a week to eat and to go to the movies. They felt very middle class.”
Like her parents, Ms Gordon, 55, is at the median. Between her job as an administrative assistant at a dentist’s office in Rockford, a city of 150,000 some 90 miles north-west of Chicago, and her husband’s work at a call-centre, they make $52,000 a year – close to the annual median household income of about $50,000, according to the Census Bureau.