The reports by Jack White and Joseph Boyce for this week's cover story often bordered on autobiography. Contributing Editor White's first file, on the historical roots of the black middle class, came particularly close to home, as White's grandfather was born a slave and his father, the youngest of 17 children, is a physician and professor at Howard University Medical School. White attended Swarthmore College and covered black affairs for the Washington Post and Nashville's Race Relations Reporter before joining TIME in 1972. To ensure that the middle-class black families he interviewed would be strangers to him, White sought out subjects in four cities through third and fourth parties -- but discovered that he and his interviewees invariably had acquaintances in common. While writing the cover profiles on middle-class families, White took a surreal evening off to report on Sly Stone's wedding, which coincidentally occurred last week (see PEOPLE).

San Francisco Bureau Chief Boyce grew up in Danville, Ill., at first living in one room with his mother and brother. When he later moved to Chicago, his black middle-class school chums "would politely but firmly remind me of my place." In all, though, his new friends received him into their homes graciously, a fact he recalled on being warmly welcomed by the families he reported on for the cover story. "The subjects were cooperative, even eager to talk about their life-styles and aspirations," he says, "which don't differ much from those of middle-class whites. But I came away with the reinforced belief that black Americans on all levels are still confined by overt and subtle prejudice."

Associate Editor Edwin Warner wrote the main body of the cover story, and Reporter-Researcher Sarah Bedell grappled with the welter of statistics and details. Warner, having written a succession of gloomy political stories, was pleased to be discussing the good fortunes of the black middle class. "It's nice to see that society can function despite all the things that have gone wrong," he says. Contributing Editor Ivan Webster was assigned an accompanying story about the black underclass -- an experience far less heartening. "It's a grim but necessary part of the larger story," he notes. "It amounts to a cry of alarm -- I only hope the cry is heard."

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