A panorama of the complex situation of ‘middle-class’ African Americans in the late 1960s. Jacqueline Stewart has called the film “a tour de force exploration of the external and internal pressures that the Negro middle class faces at a watershed moment in American political history.” The film demonstrates how persistent racism negates the educational and professional accomplishments of African Americans working to join white society or to create a black society parallel to the more affluent white middle class, while being confronted by the development of black political and aesthetic militancy.