Sanford & Son.

Fred Sanford owned a small business and lived in Los Angeles in an era when the majority of African Americans were working unskilled wage jobs [0] and overwhelmingly living in the South.

He and Lamont were middle and upper-middle class by African American standards as was seen in the 1970 Negro (the then term for African Americans) Census by the the US Department of Commerce.

And by overall American standards back then they would have probably been around the 50th to 60th percentile of households by income and would have been earning at least 60% than their racial peers in the South at the exact same time.

If you go through US Census data from 1970 - almost a decade after the Civil Rights Act was passed - it is harrowing. Now imagine how much worse it was before that.

[0] - https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/1971/demographi...