In his essay “The Talented Tenth” (1903), W. E. B. Du Bois offers what has become one of the most (in)famous paradigms for African American stratification and intraracial class relations. As Du Bois envisioned it, the Talented Tenth comprises an upper class of African Americans who bear responsibility for “uplifting” less privileged blacks. His theory of the differentiation and function of social classes so closely corresponds to that of many of the authors in the preceding chapters—and so strongly contrasts the attitudes about class in later twentieth-century African American literature and thought—that the concept warrants examination here as the culmination of this study.
Published just months after his magnum opus The Souls of Black Folk (1903), “The Talented Tenth” argues for liberal education for African Americans rather than industrial training alone. Lest detractors, white and black, discredit the notion of a liberally trained class as impractical or superfluous, Du Bois summons examples of the pre-1900 black “Talented Tenth” whose legacy benefited the race and nation. Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, physician James McCune Smith, and congressman John Mercer Langston are among those the author lists to familiarize his readers. “You misjudge us because you do not know us,” Du Bois suggests, “From the very first it has been the educated and intelligent of the Negro people that have led and elevated the mass” (34).
Du Bois’s assertion in this passage hints at what is at stake in his formulation of a Talented Tenth. First, through his careful selection of exemplars, he establishes a class-based genealogy, choosing as his forefathers and mothers African Americans who merged
intellectual rigor and highbrow culture with social activism. Notably, he omits successful self-made entrepreneurs, barbers, head waiters, and other workers who, because of the limited occupational range in some nineteenth-century black communities, otherwise may have been granted favorable social standing.62 Ignoring, for the most part, the economic leadership of trades people and businessmen and women allows Du Bois to highlight advanced education, which he imagines as producing cultivation and leadership, as the central standard of class status. The implications of Du Bois’s biographical survey are significant because, as John Ernest explains, nineteenth-century black writers penned “liberation historiography,” conscious of how their constructions of the past related to their futures in freedom. Rather than objective representations of lives and events, “conceptions of historical truth are culturally generated and necessarily reflect struggles for cultural authority” (Ernest 3). Du Bois’s adulation of men including Benjamin Banneker and
Alexander Crummell, leader of the American Negro Academy to which Du Bois contributed, reflects a contest in his era over which model of black social leadership would prevail: the
62One exception in Du Bois’s class genealogy is Sojourner Truth, whom he lists among black abolitionists noted
for “their own hard experiences and well wrought culture [that] said silently more than all the drawn periods of orators” (Du Bois 40-41). Perhaps Du Bois includes Truth, who remained unlettered throughout her life, because she was rich in “hard experiences” to share with her listeners, for from the perspective of many of her contemporaries, Truth lacked the “well wrought culture” Du Bois mentions. In fact, Frederick Douglass resented Truth’s lack of “culture” during their encounters; according to him, she was a boisterous spokesperson who interrupted his public speeches with frank assertions and tried “to ridicule my efforts to speak and act like a person of cultivation and refinement” (qtd. in McFeely 97). An anomaly in Du Bois’s compilation, Truth supplements the almost entirely male cadre of the Talented Tenth; Phillis Wheatley is the only other female figure mentioned in the essay. As Hazel Carby notes, Du Bois’s vision of leadership most often was invested in black masculinity, though he ostensibly commended black women and endorsed their claims (Carby 10).
scholarly, professional one Du Bois endorsed or the practical businessman of Booker T. Washington’s economic initiative.
Secondly, the syntax of Du Bois’s sentence—“you misjudge us because you do not know us”— further reflects the struggle for authority during the early twentieth century. Not limiting his analysis to detached commentary, Du Bois uses a first-person pronoun to situate himself squarely among the educated elite. He sets up a triangular relation among the
addressee or reader (“you”), the Talented Tenth (“us”), and the black masses (the implied “them”). As I propose, Du Bois’s assertion can serve as a refrain that expresses the social class tensions resonating in twentieth-century African American literature and criticism. Fictional depictions of black stratification often reflect this struggle among the Talented Tenth, the black masses, and a third party, which is often the white American middle class. By tracing the shifting dynamics among “you,” “us,” and “them,” we can follow the struggle over African American literary representation and class disparity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I turn first to a reading of Du Bois’s “The Talented Tenth,” examining how this turn-of-the-century manifesto shaped the identity and consciousness of the black elite. A brief look at Langston Hughes’s commentaries on intraracial class inequality shows how New Negro artists in the 1920s shifted the labels “us” and “them,” bringing to the center of literary depiction the working classes previously relegated to the margins. Finally, I
examine how other twentieth-century reactions to the Talented Tenth limit the class analyses of nineteenth-century African American literature. This final section also situates the present project, Our Kind of People, in scholarly trends that attempt to interpret social class in African American fiction.
I
As the historio-critical overview in Chapter I indicates, African American thinkers well before emancipation were attuned to intraracial social class differences and designated a professional class to guide social and political mobilization. In his 1841 social history,
Sketches of the Higher Classes of Colored Society in Philadelphia, Joseph Willson proposes that making the black elite more visible in the city would perhaps change whites’ impressions of the race, as well as provide a good model for other blacks. Examining the social structure in Philadelphia more than forty years later in 1882, city commissioner H. Price Williams reiterated the mission of the black elite. In his editorial “The Organization of Colored Society,” Williams insists that the professional class should serve as “walking mirrors” for the lower classes to “look and pattern after.” As he surmises, “The example of a refined, educated society tends to benefit the masses and inspire young men and women to seek the best associates” (Williams 1). Thus the social philosophy behind the formation of an educated elite is not original with Du Bois.63 Yet his alliterative moniker “The Talented Tenth” and his innovations to the concept have been most enduring.
A counterargument to Washington’s plan of industrial education, Du Bois’s essay “The Talented Tenth” is framed as a debate on educational curricula, but the underlying message of the text interrogates the relationship between race and social class. “The Talented Tenth” was published in the 1903 collection The Negro Problem, a compilation of essays by black men who had distinguished themselves as adept at theorizing the race problem.64
63Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham notes that Henry Morehouse, an officer of the American Baptist Home Mission
Society, used the phrase “the talented tenth man” in an 1896 article in The Independent (Gates 125). However according to David Levering Lewis, Du Bois’s foremost biographer, Du Bois may have been developing the notion of The Talented Tenth as early as 1887, though he did not articulate the concept fully until 1903 (Lewis 73).
Booker T. Washington’s “Industrial Education” appears first in the collection, and the volume also includes essays by Charles W. Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, T. Thomas Fortune, editor of the black newspaper, the New York Age, and other figures well-known in their own time. Using statistics, charts and other social scientific measures to support the three enumerated points of his argument, Du Bois defends his position against the usual objections to African American higher education. His findings claim that the majority of educated blacks did find jobs, though in a limited range of occupations such as teacher, preacher, and doctor.
By assuming that animosity toward black social aspirants results from lack of insight—that his readers simply did not recognize the already long-standing tradition of a black upper class—Du Bois self-consciously objects to the conflation of the black elite with the masses. If a lack of racial cultivation were the reason that African Americans were legally and socially denied privileges in the United States, Du Bois seeks to correct that
misjudgment:
Do Americans ever stop to reflect that there are in this land a million men of Negro blood, well-educated, owners of homes, against the honor of whose womanhood no breath was ever raised, whose men occupy positions of trust and usefulness, and who, judged by any standard, have reached the full measure of the best type of modern European culture? Is it fair, it is decent, is it Christian to ignore these facts of the Negro problem, to belittle such aspiration? (“Talented Tenth” 44)
In the course of the essay, Du Bois sets out to persuade his readers, “you,” that for a select group of African Americans, liberal education and the class opportunities that it may afford should supersede the disadvantages associated with their race. Put another way: he suggests that the leadership responsibilities entrusted to The Talented Tenth, based on their education
64
Booker T. Washington often is assumed to have been the editor of The Negro Problem, but David Levering Lewis contests that “a now unidentifiable white editor” compiled the volume (Lewis 288).