Yes,it was a boom time for the one third of so of Blacks who were in the middle and entrpeneurial class but the Eighties were also the decade that the traditional black family just about vanished from the hood!
Not that it was Reagan's fault by any stretch of the imagination but when crack came to the ghetto the consequences were disasterous.I saw literally DOZENS of blacks where I worked lose their jobs,families and self respect to the Crack Monster.
The Eighties were a time of horrid fear in urban America.The effects are still present but the GW Bush years are far better than the Reagan years vis a vis black people.
Riverman
Did the black families 'vanish' because they were destroyed, or because traditional families had the strength to escape and the will to do so before they were destroyed?
It would not be hard to imagine that traditional black families would have been a stabilizing influence, and that the places they left would suffer from their departure. On the other hand, I don't know that such families would have survived too many generations in the environment of liberal hatered that would have surrounded them had they stayed.