Kathleen Cleaver (who I would interview for you if I didn't suck at networking) was also interviewed for The Two Nations of Black America. Here's her answer to the question posed by the series.

INTERVIEWER: 1997. Largest black middle class in history. Largest black underclass. Black middle class has roughly tripled since the day King died, but 45 percent of all black children live at or beneath the poverty line. How did we get here?

CLEAVER: Well, one of the ways we got here was through the takeover by corporate interests of the legal and political structures that govern our lives. The ways in which, let's say, anti-trust law or tax laws used to prevent monopolies, have been shunted aside. The ways in which the information services that are supposed to be at the disposal of the people, now are at the service of corporate interests. The ways the educational system is supposed to be under the control of the community, at the service of at least not the communities I see. The radical gap in income and residence through the sub suburbanization. So many cities have this, what you call "donut shape". In the middle is a little black hole. And all on the outside, it's all the wealth and the tax money and the resources, where white people live. And so the economic disparity has widened. It's greater than any time since the 1920's. The opportunities for people at the bottom aren't there. In order to have opportunities, you basically have to have a graduate degree. Now, only certain kinds of people can get those. But those are the people through the Affirmative Action policies implemented by a lot of private corporations, not just the government, that have created this middle class.

GATES: So the system adjusted itself. Precisely when it was annihilating the Panthers, the system adjusted itself to expand the size of the middle class to a certain point, and then shut it down. So that's why the black middle class has tripled since '68?

CLEAVER: I wouldn't say the system adjusted itself. What I would say, it was there. On the one hand, there was a amount of opportunity available under certain conditions for a certain number of people. A large number of black people already met those criteria. They were barred by race. They were not barred by deficiencies in education, deficiencies in ability, etc., etc. So those people who could take advantage of those Remember the saying back in the sixties, the NAACP, National Association for the Advancement of Certain People?

And one thing that is important to understand is that capitalist form of democracy, or I like to call it the "commercial democracy", needs people like us, or needs a middle class to function smoothly. It doesn't need equality. What it needs is inequality. It needs a certain number of people at the elite level, a certain number of people in the middle level, and the rest of the people scrambling and hoping they could get there, all following the same zealous commitment to making money. Now, when you have people who are revolutionaries, they repudiate the commitment to making money, and say, "We want justice. We want change. We want truth. We want freedom." Well, that's not going to work if the structure is based on financial rewards and financial incentives. So we were at odds with the way the system worked.