Try hailing a taxi: prosperity can't cure all ills. (Commentary).

THE contrast couldn't have been more glaring. According to the report from the Children's Defense Fund, nearly I million black children now live not in poverty, but "extreme poverty." That's the greatest number in nearly a quarter century.

Yet barely a week before that report came out, a U.S. Census report found that blacks had made gains in education, owned more homes and more of their children lived in two-parent households.

The tale of progress in black America is evident in more than reports and crunched census data. In recent days, Black Entertainment Television founder Robert Johnson outbid Larry Bird for a professional basketball franchise, and Oprah Winfrey cracked the billionaire's club.

A year ago, Denzel Washington and Halle Berry copped top acting honors at the Academy Awards, and black executives grabbed the top spots at American Express, AOL-Time-Warner, and Merrill Lynch. Add to that the legions of multi-millionaire black superstar athletes, celebrities and professionals.

The widening rift between the black haves and the have-nots has been around a while.

According to Census figures, between 1975 and 1995 the number of black professionals, technicians, administrators and managers nearly tripled, and the number of black college graduates doubled. By 2000, more than 15 percent of black households earned more than $50,000 annually. The top one fifth of black families earned nearly half of all black income.

Black wealth, like white wealth, was now concentrated in fewer hands. In the 1950s, sociologist E. Franklin Frazier warned that many blacks were becoming what he contemptuously branded a black bourgeoisie that controlled the wealth and power within the black community and that had turned their backs on their own people.

Worse, many members of Frazier's black bourgeoisie had begun to mimic the values, standards and ideals of the white middle class, and to distance themselves from the black poor.

In the 1960s, federal entitlements, civil rights legislation, equal opportunity statutes and affirmative action programs initiated during the Johnson administration broke the last barriers of legal segregation. The path to universities and corporations for some blacks was now wide open.

More blacks than ever did what their parents only dreamed of: They fled blighted inner-city areas in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Detroit and Atlanta. By the end of the 1980s, one in 10 blacks was affluent enough to move to the suburbs. The expansion of tract homes, condos and apartments made their move easier. In the decade since the 1992 riots, the stampede of black businesses and professionals from these areas accelerated.

During the same time, civil rights organizations and black politicians defined the black agenda in increasingly narrow terms: affirmative action, economic parity and professional advancement. Lacking education, competitive skills and training, the black have-nots were further hurtled to the outer fringes of society.

But while black professionals, politicians and celebrities may be light years from poor blacks in their wealth and status, color is hardly a relic of the past. Taxi drivers ignore them and they can be spread-eagled by police. They file countless EEOC complaints and lawsuits against corporations for stacking them at the low end in management positions.

Rich versus poor, progress and poverty -- yes it's an old tale. The twist is that it's a tale that can be told in black America.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is the author of "The Crisis in Black and Black" (Middle Passage Press) and hosts a weekly radio show on KPFK-FM