That was then. I'm talking about now. The Irish immigrants who came over in the 1800's and early 1900's may have been largely uneducated peasants, but within one or two generations they dragged themselves into the middle class.
Well, the blacks managed to do much the same by the 1950s, against even greater odds. The paradox is that the Civil Rights movement stopped that momentum by making the younger generation think that their fathers and grandfathers were saps for working their buns off to get ahead. Instead, they turned to the government to give them full economic equality with the whites NOW! As Charles Murry pointed out, the New Society destroyed the incentives that had raised so many blacks into the middle-class. Even Amos and Andy showed how far along they had come by 1954.