The Talented Tenth

“The Talented Tenth,” by W. E. B. Du Bois, is one of seven essays included in The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative American Negroes of To-Day, published by James Pott & Co. in 1903. The book was edited by Booker T. Washington, who also contributed the first essay in the collection. Besides Washington and Du Bois, contributors include Charles W. Chesnutt, Wilford H. Smith, H. T. Kealing, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and T. Thomas Fortune.

Content warning: As was common in 1903, Du Bois uses the term “negro” or “Negro” to refer to African Americans. Du Bois sometimes uses “men” in its generic sense to refer to all human beings. All page numbers refer to the 1903 edition published by James Pott & Co.

“The Talented Tenth” is one of Du Bois’s best-known works, written at a time when he was pivoting from traditional social and economic theories to the more activist and radical ideology of his later career. The concept of the talented tenth was developed by the American Baptist Home Mission Society (ABHMS), and first appeared in print in an article (with the same title) by the ABHMS’s Corresponding Secretary and Field Secretary Henry Lyman Morehouse in 1896. As in much of his writing during this period, Du Bois criticizes Washington, who emphasized vocational training and accumulation of capital as the path for Black Americans to improve their condition. Du Bois’s chief concern, by contrast, is the education of an intellectual elite. He argues that African Americans can improve their social reality only through an elite consisting of professionals—chiefly teachers—who will lead the masses. This emphasis on elites is evident from the first sentence: “The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men” (33).

Du Bois states that the educational situation in the African American community is dire. The 1901 Atlanta Conference of Negro Problems stated that half of school-age African Americans “have no opportunities open to them for learning to read, write and cipher” (64). Further, fewer than one million of three million school-age African American children are “regularly attending school” and most school sessions last “only a few months” (64). He adds, “The Negro race in the South needs teachers to-day above all else” (65). In his view, well-trained, college-educated teachers are necessary for the improvement of African American wellbeing. Creating such teachers will come, Du Bois argues, by educating the community’s “exceptional men.”

The problem of education, then, among African Americans must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races (33).

As for curriculum, Du Bois describes an education that will create “manhood” as the “object of the work of the schools—intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge of the world that was and is, and of the relation of men to it—this is the curriculum of that Higher Education which must underlie true life” (33-34). The elite will have a broad liberal arts college education that will form their character.

Du Bois next states that “three tasks lay before me” (34). He says the first is “to show from the past that the Talented Tenth as they have risen among American Negroes have been worthy of leadership.” The second is “to show how these men may be educated and developed.” And the third is “to show their relation to the Negro problem” (34).

To show that the talented tenth are worthy of leadership, Du Bois examines historical African American intellectual leaders such as Phillis Wheatley, Paul Cuffe, and Benjamin Banneker, whose letter to Thomas Jefferson Du Bois quotes at length. He then considers James Derham, Lemuel Haynes, Ira Aldridge, and David Walker (he quotes part of the preamble to Walker’s Appeal). Du Bois also quotes from the 1831 National Negro Convention and discusses the movement for abolition, citing Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and others. He notes that Black abolitionists were mainly trained at foreign universities or attended schools in New York and Philadelphia, the outstanding exception being the self-taught Frederick Douglass. After Emancipation new leaders arose who, “through political organization, historical and polemical writing and moral regeneration […] strove to uplift the people” (42).

Having completed his first task of examining the role of the talented tenth historically, Du Bois moves on to a consideration of how such leaders should be trained and the “hands of the risen few strengthened” (45). He answers unequivocally: “The best and most capable of their youth must be schooled in the colleges and universities of the land” (45). While Du Bois does not mandate what should be taught or how it should be taught, saying that “each soul and each race-soul needs its own peculiar curriculum,” he does state that a “university is a human invention for the transmission of knowledge and culture from generation to generation […] no other human invention will suffice, not even trade and industrial schools” (46). The reference to “trade and industrial schools” is a critique of Washington, who championed such education. Du Bois returns to Washington’s rival educational philosophy later in the essay.

Du Bois then examines the talented tenth and their “relation to the Negro problem” (34). Can the work of such colleges “stand the test of time?” (48). Du Bois notes that African American students encounter “much color prejudice” and even “to-day [1903] no Negro has ever been admitted to Princeton” (50). The function of the African American college graduate is to be “the group leader, the man who sets the ideals of the community where he lives, directs its thoughts and heads its social movements” (54). While clergymen lead the church (the African American community’s “greatest social institution”), college-educated teachers have performed a “mighty […] miracle.” His goal is “to furnish five millions and more of ignorant people with teachers of their own race and blood,” placing “before the eyes of almost every Negro child an attainable ideal” (55).

Once leaders have been trained for schools and colleges and a “foundation of intelligence” created in the public schools, then trade or industrial schools must be established to provide the necessary technical skills for the African American community. Although he emphasizes university education for the talented tenth, Du Bois grants that it “will not do to give all attention to one” method and that there is a place for vocational education (57). Yet, any system of education that does not provide for the education of the talented tenth is “simply throwing your money to the winds” (59). The “trained, living soul” breathes life into students, whether “black or white, Greek, Russian or American” (59). If industrial schools, such as Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, are “as successful as they deserve to be,” this success is due primarily to the “white colleges of the North and the black colleges of the South, which trained the teachers who to-day conduct these institutions” (60).

Du Bois concludes by addressing the “men of America.” He argues that the African race was transplanted to North America “through the criminal foolishness of your fathers” (74). If efforts are not made to educate and cultivate African Americans, he says, “they will pull you down” (75). He says that education and work are the “levers to uplift a people” (75). Work alone is insufficient, and education that only teaches work is insufficient. Education must teach “Life,” and such an all-encompassing education demands African American “leaders of thought and missionaries of culture” (75). Only African Americans and African American colleges can undertake this missionary work and create the necessary elite. He concludes by echoing his first sentence “The Negro race, like all other races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men” (75).