WHEN W. E. B. Du Bois published his polemical book of essays, The Souls of Black Folk, in 1903, he became the second great African-American public intellectual. Frederick Douglass, the ex-slave abolitionist, sublime orator, and critically acclaimed autobiographer—and one of only two other black intellectuals whom Du Bois would acknowledge as antecedents—was the first. In his curiously compelling little book, Du Bois was able to achieve something unprecedented in African-American letters: he was able, in fourteen lyrical essays, framed by a mystical “Forethought” and “Afterthought,” to give a narrative voice and shape to the “nationhood”—the status as a “nation-within-a-nation”—of eight million descendants of both the African past and human bondage, flung together from hundreds of cultures and geographical locations, from Senegambia and the Gold Coast to Angola and the Congo, and forged into a new people, sui generis, in the harsh cauldron of chattel, race-based slavery in the New World.
Practically overnight, Souls was hailed as a monumental achievement, a classic work by any standard: through myth and metaphor, and in a densely lyrical yet polemical prose, the young Du Bois charted the contours of the civilization—the arts and sciences, the metaphysical and religious systems, the myths and music, the social and political institutions, the history both before and after Emancipation—that defined a truly African-American culture at the narrate a black dual nationhood: a nationality at once American yet paradoxically and resonantly African-American.
A. C. McClurg and Company of Chicago published The Souls of Black Folk on April 18, 1903, just two months after the author’s thirty-fifth birthday. Between 1903 and 1905, no fewer than six printings of the book were necessary to satisfy demand. Despite his young age, the author, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868–1963), had become by the turn of the century “one of the two or three best-known Afro-Americans in the nation,” as the historian Herbert Aptheker accurately observes. Indeed, Du Bois’s emergence as a dominant political figure in the Afro-American community is without parallel in the history of black leadership, because his vehicle to prominence was not the deed, or the spoken word; it was the written word. Even his contemporaries realized how curious his route to power had been; as the Afro-American educator William H. Ferris, a Yale graduate, put the matter in The African Abroad in 1913:
Du Bois is one of the few men in history who was hurled on the throne of leadership by the dynamic force of the written word. He is one of the few writers who leaped to the front as a leader and became the head of a popular movement through impressing his personality upon men by means of a book.
What’s more, Ferris concludes, Du Bois’s ascendancy was inadvertent: “He had no aspiration of becoming a race leader when he wrote his Souls of Black Folk. But that book has launched him upon a brilliant career.”
The publication of Souls marked a high point in Du Bois’s phenomenal career, which had begun with his graduation from Fisk University in 1888. At his graduation from Harvard in 1890, where he took a B.A., cum laude, in philosophy (he had taken his first A.B. at Fisk), he delivered one of the five commencement orations. The address, on Jefferson Davis, received extraordinarily broad mention in the national press. In the fall of that year, he entered the Harvard graduate school. While an undergraduate at Harvard, his principal mentors had been William James and George Santayana (philosophy), Frank Taussig (economics), and Albert Bushnell Hart (history). Du Bois’s first love was philosophy. But because employment opportunities were limited for black philosophers, he decided on graduate study in history. Study in Europe had long been Du Bois’s dream; in October 1892, having earned an M.A. in history at Harvard the year before, he enrolled at Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, studying sociology, economics, history, and political theory.
Berlin was all that he had hoped for academically; Du Bois enjoyed the challenging rigor of his work there, including lectures by the great sociologist Max Weber, who would remain a close friend. (In 1904, Weber would participate in Du Bois’s annual conference at Atlanta University on the status of the Negro.) Du Bois wrote a thesis on agricultural economics in the South and ardently desired to take a Ph.D. Unable to do so (because of a residency requirement that he was unable to satisfy due to lack of funds), Du Bois returned to the United States and began to teach the classics at Wilberforce University, in Xenia, Ohio. A year later, in 1895, the year Frederick Douglass died, he became the first person of African descent to take a Ph.D. from Harvard.
Du Bois’s next eight years were exceptionally productive. In 1896, he published his doctoral dissertation, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870, as volume 1 of the Harvard Historical Monograph Series. That autumn, he moved to the University of Pennsylvania to undertake a sociological study of the Negro population of Philadelphia. One year later, he joined with Alexander Crummell and other black scholars in founding the American Negro Academy, the very first black institute of arts and letters in the world.
In the fall of 1897, Du Bois commenced a professorship of economics and history at Atlanta University, where he assumed the directorship of the “Atlanta Conferences,” convened annually to generate precise scientific research about the actual living conditions of Negroes in America, about whom surprisingly little sound scientific data existed. Du Bois edited the products of these conferences and published them in a monograph series, between 1889 and 1914, in sixteen volumes. His intention was to collect, collate, and analyze socioeconomic data about every conceivable facet of black life in America. This project was a bold, imaginative venture, one motivated by Du Bois’s belief that ignorance, rather than a primal xenophobia or economic relationships, was the primary cause of racism. Du Bois would much later abandon that view, deciding that material relationships—especially economic scarcity—masked themselves in the guise of race relationships.
In 1899, the results of his sociological research at the University of Pennsylvania were published as The Philadelphia Negro. Between 1897 and 1903, Du Bois, starting with an essay printed in the Atlantic Monthly, became one of the most widely published authors in the United States. His essays appeared in such prominent publications as The Independent, The Nation, The Southern Workman, Harper’s Weekly, World’s Work, The Outlook, The Missionary Review, The Literary Digest, the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and The Dial, among other magazines and journals. He was a polymath.
By 1903, then, Du Bois not only could count himself among the most deeply read, most widely traveled, and most broadly and impeccably educated human beings in the world, he had also become the most widely published black essayist in the history of African Americans since the abolitionist campaign led by Frederick Douglass. Du Bois was, more than any other figure—including his nemesis, Booker T. Washington (the founder of the Tuskegee Institute and the dominant political force in Negro politics between 1895 and 1915)—the public written “voice” of the Negro American intellectual.
Despite the powerful achievement of Souls, however, in it Du Bois had failed to account adequately for class differences within the black community, the differences that resulted from broadly diverse access to education among blacks themselves, and the implications of these differentials of education, income, customs, habits, and philosophies. For if, in an age of oppression unparalleled since the collapse of slavery in 1865, an age that the historian Rayford Logan would call “the nadir” in African-American history; if, in this age of Black Codes and the birth of Jim Crow segregation, sanctioned as recently as 1896 by the Supreme Court in the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson decision; if blacks were defined before the law as members of one undifferentiated class, within the African-American nation, class structures were at least a century or more old. To address the relations among these classes—the social and ethical responsibilities that black “haves” bore to black “have-nots”—in 1903 Du Bois also published his essay “The Talented Tenth,” which can be read as a coda to The Souls of Black Folk.
Du Bois had been preparing this large statement since the death of Frederick Douglass in 1895. Eighteen ninety-five would prove to be a momentous year in Du Bois’s life, for in that year he not only would bury his first hero, he would insert another, Alexander Crummell, in his place. The work of both would be central in shaping his thinking about the ethical role of black intellectuals generally, and would especially inform his thoughts about the Talented Tenth.
Du Bois was deeply moved when, on February 20, 1895, he received news of Douglass’s death. In his grief, he was moved on that night to write and rewrite a series of elegies to Douglass, feeling the weight of the mantle that, secretly, he felt to be his. Over and over, Du Bois struggled with the poems’ tone, with the image of death and the legacy of tradition. If Douglass’s mantle would be a burden, it was a burden he longed to bear. Douglass haunted Du Bois, dogging his steps as the model to be emulated, and as a counterforce to Booker T. Washington’s theories of laissez-faire economics and laissez-faire political accommodation.
Du Bois had every reason to be anxious about this. Just a few months after Douglass’s death, Booker T. Washington would deliver his infamous “Atlanta Exposition” speech, catapulting himself into a position as the conservative leader of the black community. Even Du Bois’s beloved Harvard would award Washington an honorary A.M. degree in 1896. For the turn-of-the-century black neo-abolitionists, Douglass’s legacy was in grave danger of being dismantled by one of their own.
Du Bois eulogized Douglass at a memorial service at Wilberforce University, and shortly following the publication of The Souls of Black Folk, he agreed to write a biography of Douglass in a series being published by the George W. Jacobs publishing company of Philadelphia. Jacobs withdrew this offer early in 1904, when Booker T. Washington accepted the company’s earlier invitation, which had remained unanswered until Du Bois accepted, thus robbing Du Bois of the opportunity to immortalize Douglass as he had Alexander Crummell just a few months before.
Alexander Crummell was the first African American to take a bachelor’s degree from the University of Cambridge, an Episcopal priest who served twenty years in Liberia, and, after 1873, the rector of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., which President Chester A. Arthur occasionally attended. Most important, however, for Du Bois, Crummell in 1897 founded, and served as the first president of, the American Negro Academy.
Du Bois never met Frederick Douglass; his first meeting with Crummell, on the other hand, was one of the truly germinal moments in his intellectual life. He would immortalize that day, and the awe that Crummell had inspired, in the essay “Of Alexander Crummell,” which he published in The Souls of Black Folk.
Du Bois would pay ultimate tribute both to Douglass and to Crummell in what is perhaps the most fitting way of all: he grounded his essay “The Talented Tenth” in two essays written by his mentors—Douglass’s 1854 address “The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered” and one of Crummell’s central works, “Civilization: The Primal Need of the Race,” his inaugural address as president of the American Negro Academy, delivered in 1897.
In Douglass’s address, a remarkably prescient speech made to the scholars at Western Reserve College, he had asserted the fundamental equality of all members of the human species; the underlying unity of black cultures in Africa and the New World; the social construction of difference; the role of environment, as opposed to genetics, in the shaping of human intelligence; and the antiquity of black cultures, traceable to the ancient Egyptians:
It is somewhat remarkable, that, at a time when knowledge is so generally diffused, when the geography of the world is so well understood—when time and space, in the intercourse of nations, are almost annihilated—when oceans have become bridges—the earth a magnificent hall—the hollow sky a dome—under which a common humanity can meet in friendly conclave—when nationalities are being swallowed up—and the ends of the earth brought together—I say it is remarkable—nay, it is strange that there should arise a phalanx of learned men—speaking in the name of science—to forbid the magnificent reunion of mankind in one brotherhood. A mortifying proof is here given, that the moral growth of a nation, or an age, does not always keep pace with the increase of knowledge, and suggests the necessity of means to increase human love with human learning.
From Alexander Crummell, Du Bois took the following sentiment, which could have served as the epigraph of his 1903 essay: “The primal need of the Negro is absorption in civilization, in all its several lines, as a preparation for civil functions, and the use of political power. Just now he is the puppet and the tool of white demagogues and black sycophants.” As David Levering Lewis shows so well in his stellar W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, Crummell knew that nationalism was the proverbial figure in the carpet for black intellectuals. As Lewis writes, Crummell identified “two great heresies” within black intellectual thought: “that the colored people of this country should forget as soon as possible that they ARE colored people,” and “that colored men should give up all distinctive efforts as colored men, in schools, churches, associations, and friendly societies.” Moreover, “If I forget that I am a black man, and you ignore the fact of race, and we both, ostrich-like, stick our heads in the sand … what are you and I to do for our social nature?” Negroes in America, he concluded, “are a nation set apart in this country.”
In “The Conservation of Races,” a speech to the American Negro Academy that followed Crummell’s in 1897, Du Bois articulated two ideas that would prove to be pivotal in his early career, and which would be central to the argument put forth in “The Talented Tenth.” The first was his critique of Jeffersonian individualism, the notion that in America, for the first time, rights and duties were individual-based, not group-based. Not so, Du Bois declared. The Negro, he argued, had been brought to these shores as forced labor, by definition, as a member of a group; he or she experienced oppression, by definition, as a member of this group; custom, practice, and even, in the case of the Negro, the law had “silently but definitely separated men into groups,” and among these groups, precisely because of their internal histories as well as their external treatment, there existed cultural and social differences, “subtle, delicate and elusive, though they may be.”
Du Bois then made his most important argument, in which he attempted to define the relation between what T. S. Eliot would two decades later call “tradition and the individual talent”: “The history of the world is the history, not of individuals, but of groups, not of nations, but of races, and he who ignores or seeks to override the race idea in human history ignores and overrides the central thought of all history.” Tradition, Du Bois argues, is a cultural construct, one inextricably tied to the concept of nationhood.
Du Bois proceeded to paint a vast canvas of a truly multicultural world, with each nation, or “race,” assigned its own, equal subjectivity in Nature’s grand work of art, a genuinely humane world civilization. The American Negro bore a relation to Negroes in Africa, he wrote, similar to that which the intellectual and professional elite within “the race”—“the advanced guard,” as he would put it time and time again—bore to those less fortunate victims of slavery and segregation who comprised the bulk of African Americans at the turn of the century.
Just as African Americans were the vanguard of the world’s Negro peoples, so too were the members of the intellectual class simultaneously the most representative members of, and the natural leaders of, the American Negro people. And it is as Negroes, as an African people in the New World, first and foremost, that we exist, Du Bois argued.
[W]hat after all, am I? Am I an American or am I a Negro? Can I be both? Or is it my duty to cease to be a Negro as soon as possible and be an American? If I strive as a Negro, am I not perpetuating the very cleft that threatens and separates black and white America? Is not my only possible practical aim the subduction of all that is Negro in me to the American? Does my black blood place upon me any more obligation to assert my nationality than German, or Irish or Italian blood would? …
Here it seems to me, is the reading of the riddle that puzzles so many of us. We are Americans, not only by birth and by citizenship, but by our political ideals, our language, our religion. Farther than that, our Americanism does not go. At that point, we are Negroes, members of a vast historic race that from the very dawn of creation has slept, but half awakening in the dark forests of its African fatherland. We are the first fruits of this new nation, the harbinger of that black tomorrow which is yet destined to soften the whiteness of the Teutonic today.
The relation between the black individual and the group, he argued, is that between the part and the whole. Oppression by groups—three centuries of such oppression—has led to cultural, social, and political organization by groups, especially since the rights of the Negro individual (as the Supreme Court had reminded the larger society just the year before in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which affirmed “separate but equal” as a reasonable doctrine applying to social relations between blacks and whites) were almost entirely subsumed under rights accorded, or denied, the Negro as a group.
These central ideas became the scaffolding of the structure outlined in Du Bois’s blueprint for the duties and obligations of Negro leadership which he developed in “The Talented Tenth.” The phrase itself Du Bois appropriated from Henry Morehouse (as historian Evelyn Brooks-Higginbotham has shown), who coined the term in 1896, one year after Booker T. Washington delivered his famous speech enunciating the tenets of political and social accommodation at the Atlanta Exposition, the year of Plessy v. Ferguson. Morehouse, the executive secretary of the American Baptist Home Mission Society between 1879 and 1893 and again between 1902 and 1917, in an article printed in The Independent wrote:
I repeat that not to make proper provision for the high education of the talented tenth man of the colored colleges is a prodigious mistake. It is to dwarf the tree that has in it the promise of a grand oak. Industrial education is good for the nine; the common English branches are good for the nine; that tenth man ought to have the best opportunities for making the most of himself for humanity and God.
It was this concept of “the tenth man” that Du Bois would modify so dramatically in his attempt to define for a small, but rising, middle class what precisely its obligations and responsibilities to the larger black community were.
“The Talented Tenth” was Du Bois’s response to Jefferson’s notion of a “natural aristocracy,” those endowed, by nature, with the innate talent and opportunities to lead, to excel. To speak of a “tenth” of the Negro people as conforming to any reasonable definition of a middle class was optimistic, to say the least. By 1917, for example, only 2,132 black Americans were attending college; in 1900, just over 2,000 held college degrees, while 21,000 blacks were schoolteachers. By 1930, according to historian Carter G. Woodson, there were 1,748 black physicians, 1,230 lawyers, and 2,131 academic administrators, “with some hundreds of bankers, businessmen, engineers, architects, and scientists.” As David Levering Lewis puts it, Du Bois seems to be referring to the “million men of Negro blood, well-educated, owners of homes … who, judged by any standard, have reached the full measure of the best type of modern European culture.” “A far more accurate characterization,” Lewis concludes, “would have been the Talented Hundredth.” Curiously enough, in 1948, Du Bois himself, in a rereading of his own 1903 essay, modified the phrase to just that: “the Guiding Hundredth.”
When Du Bois wrote “The Talented Tenth,” blacks comprised 11.6 percent of the population. The 1900 U.S. Census had counted 8,833,944 Negroes. Of these, approximately 90 percent lived in the South, while only 25 percent lived in urban areas. Life expectancy for black men and women was thirty-four years, compared to forty-eight years for white men and women. Illiteracy among blacks was 44.5 percent.
The nation had legally abandoned the fundamental principles of Reconstruction in the Plessy decision of 1896, having abandoned them politically in the Hayes-Tilden Compromise exactly two decades before. From 1896 to 1903, at least 730 blacks were reported lynched. In 1898, Georgia inaugurated something it called “the white primary,” in which only whites could vote in Democratic primary contests. Louisiana adopted a “grandfather clause” in its state constitution; as a result, the number of blacks registered to vote in that state dropped from 130,344 in 1896 to 5,320 in 1900. The Supreme Court, true to the mold cast in Plessy two years before, upheld the poll tax (in Williams v. Mississippi) as constitutional. The first antilynching bill, introduced in 1900 in Congress by George H. White, failed to get out of committee. One year later, White’s second term ended, ending black representation in Congress until 1928. To say that the status of Negroes was at its “nadir,” as the historian Rayford Logan put it, when Du Bois wrote his essay is to understate their perilous condition.
“The Talented Tenth” was published in a book of essays entitled The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative American Negroes of Today, thought to have been edited, or at least endorsed, by Du Bois’s nemesis, Booker T. Washington himself. In addition to essays by Washington and Du Bois, the book includes pieces by Charles W. Chesnutt, Wilford H. Smith, H. T. Kealing, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and T. Thomas Fortune. Washington’s presence in that volume and probable sponsorship makes Du Bois’s opening paragraph all the more daring, amounting as it did to a direct challenge both to Washington’s political ideology and to his stance on the Negro’s education.
Du Bois’s essay is structured in three parts: part one is a brisk trot through the great men and women theory of black history; part two is Du Bois’s effort to show how American society can expand this “class of men,” as he puts it elsewhere; and part three contains Du Bois’s theory of the relation of these leaders “to the Negro problem.”
Du Bois, in the first section of his essay, points to the remarkable achievements against the greatest odds of a host of leading figures in African-American arts and letters, science, politics, business, and religion—figures of “moral regeneration,” as Du Bois puts it. He does so in part to show how American society can increase the size of this group of achievers (which he will elaborate upon in part two of the essay). But his essay—as well as the book in which it was printed—is also aimed in part at those white industrialists who had been such staunch supporters of Washington, who had built his castle and his moat. It was because of their vast ignorance about black history that he undertook this excursion through great black lives.
Negro leadership is “exceptional,” Du Bois continues, not because of hereditary or natural inferiority but because of the hideous effects of custom and environment, especially the pernicious history of slavery and practice of Jim Crow racism that was reemerging at the turn of the century, even as Du Bois writes his essay. To those who point to statistics concerning black poverty—of death, disease, and “crime”—and argue that this is “the happy rule,” Du Bois counters:
Of course they are the rule, because a silly nation made them the rule: Because for three long centuries this people lynched Negroes who dared to be brave, raped black women who dared to be virtuous, crushed dark-hued youth who dared to be ambitious, and encouraged and made to flourish servility and lewdness and apathy.
Rid the society of racism, Du Bois argues, and the socioeconomic roots of the supposed “moral degeneracy” of Negroes will be exposed. Blacks not limited by these conditions, he concludes, will thrive, in proportions similar to the success ratios of every other ethnic group in America.
Finally, in the essay’s third section, Du Bois outlines the ethical functions of black leadership, “the function of the college-bred Negro”: “He is, as he ought 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.”
So far, so good. But here Du Bois overstates the case, attempting to persuade even the most skeptical or hostile racist, by appearing to accept the racist premise that the Negro people need social leadership more than most groups, because they have no traditions, customs, or strong family ties of their own. To make his case, Du Bois granted his readers certain assumptions about Negro culture, which would later be developed by sociologists in the tradition of Robert Parks, who tended to stress the “pathological” side of segregated black life. Separate, by definition, was unequal because social and cultural separation and isolation, born of slavery and Jim Crow segregation, had a dehumanizing effect upon their victims. And just as he had done in “Of the Conservation of Races” six years before, Du Bois ended “The Talented Tenth” with an appeal to Americans to support his argument not for the sake of the Negro, but because it made good social and economic sense for themselves.
Du Bois felt, rightly, that Negro Americans were under siege, aided and abetted, wittingly or unwittingly, by Booker T. Washington and his followers, who, Du Bois felt, were all too eager to further their own agendas by taking a set of ideological positions which reinforced the larger society’s apparent tendency to disenfranchise the Negro and reverse the gains of Reconstruction. To appeal to even the most conservative supporters of Washington, then, Du Bois accepted the premise that much of black culture was depraved (if depraved for environmental reasons), all the better to draw a contrast with those in the race who were not depraved, hence defeating any attempt to ascribe these social or cultural “characteristics” to nature. He was also quite comfortable with the notion of elites within all groups: there were black natural aristocrats as well as white ones.
While no one has ever accused Du Bois of being egalitarian, he did seek to qualify these statements in his own rejoinder to his 1903 essay, in a speech he delivered at the Nineteenth Grand Boulé Conclave in 1948. Du Bois is at pains to do two things straightaway: first, to put to rest any idea that he had intended to be elitist in 1903, and second, to stress the notion of “service” implicit in the “call” of leadership in the black community. “It has been said that I had in mind the building of an aristocracy with neglect of the masses,” he confesses. “I assumed that with knowledge, sacrifice would automatically follow. In my youth and idealism,” he admits, “I did not realize that selfishness is even more natural than sacrifice.”
No, the members of the Talented Tenth must “work not simply as individuals,” individuals motivated primarily by “personal freedom and unhampered enjoyment and use of the world, without any real care … as to what became of the mass of American Negroes, or of the mass of any people.” Du Bois wishes to emphasize group responsibility, for a collective economic, as well as cultural, entity, which would plan “for such economic revolution in industry and just distribution of wealth, as would make the rise of our group possible.”
To demonstrate what is at the basis of this relation of part to whole, of individual to the group, Du Bois defines what he means by “race,” a concept, as Kwame Anthony Appiah has so deftly demonstrated, with which he grappled uneasily throughout his writing career. Du Bois argues that black people are not merely related physically but culturally. He explains, “I came then to advocate, not pride of biological race, but pride in a cultural group, integrated and expanded by developed ideals.”
However, Du Bois recognizes the paradox that a century’s agitation for full civil rights, coupled with the systematic racist disparagement of black culture, had led to a black cultural elite often eager to become Americans that they sometimes appeared to deny the existence of a Negro culture: “The leadership, then, of my Talented Tenth over the mass of young colored men and women, college-trained and entering their careers, faced rejection and disappearance of the Negro, both as a race and as a culture.”
Such a nation-within-a-nation, he concludes, echoing Alexander Crummell, a “nation” larger than Canada, Saudi Arabia, Hungary, the Netherlands, South Africa, Ethiopia, Australia, or Switzerland, cannot simply disappear or erase itself as one of the world’s great cultures.
Who is to lead in the preservation of this great culture and, in the process—a process as necessary in 1948 as it was in 1903—demand an end to the socioeconomic conditions afflicting the mass of the black community? Here Du Bois substitutes the phrase “group-leadership” for “the Talented Tenth,” by which he means a well-educated, “self-sacrificing,” cosmopolitan elite in “alliance with culture groups in Europe, America, Asia, and Africa, and looking toward a new world culture.” This group of leaders, if not precisely socialist, then social democrats or “liberals,” he concludes, “can free our own mass by organization and group influence exercised through a self-sacrificing leadership. This is primarily a question of character,” he admits, “which I failed to emphasize in my first proposal of a Talented Tenth.”
This new Talented Tenth, then, while remaining an elite, a vanguard, is acutely aware of its social and ethical obligations to the larger group, its members keenly aware that their privileged positions stem not from their own inherent nobility of mind and spirit but from “opportunity.” There, but for the grace of God, Du Bois maintains, pointing to the plight of the black lower classes, goes even the Talented Tenth.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.