The Talented Tenth

Du Bois argues that African Americans require an educated college elite to guide their future. The present (1903) is, he says, a “day of cowardice and vacillation, of strident wide-voiced wrong and faint hearted compromise; of double-faced dallying with Truth and Right” (43). Du Bois’s anger is evident in his assertion that averageness is the rule

[b]ecause for three long centuries this people [white America] 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 (43-44).

Du Bois does not condemn European-American culture out of hand; rather, he notes that there are “a million men of Negro blood, well-educated, owners of homes, against the honor of whose womanhood no breath was ever raised” who “have reached the full measure of the best type of modern European culture” (44).

He writes that the “masses of the Negro people” can only rise socially through the “effort and example of the aristocracy of talent and character” (45). Du Bois asks if there was ever “a nation on God’s fair earth civilized from the bottom upward,” and his answer is “Never; it is, ever was and ever will be from the top downward that culture filters” (45). “All that are worth the saving,” he says, will be saved by the talented tenth, whom he describes as a “saving remnant” (44).

Du Bois’s vision leans heavily on Social Darwinism—the view that social and economic success is due to the superior qualities of the successful person. He writes that the elite will assert itself and lead the race if artificial barriers erected by American society are removed “to make way for natural selection and the survival of the fittest” (35). He argues that every group—and so humanity at large—must have institutions for the training of the elite, places where “men are not so mystified and befuddled by the hard and necessary toil of earning a living, as to have no aims higher than their bellies, and no God greater than Gold” (46). He views education as a trickle-down affair: “colleges train in Greek and Latin and mathematics (2,000 men); these men train 50,000 others in “morals and manners,” and these in turn teach nine million men “thrift and the alphabet” (47).

Du Bois views post-Civil War African American elite education as a kind of miracle, calling it, “the most wonderful peace-battle of the 19th century,” and he does not understand those who say a college education is “all a strange mistake” and that the better method is “to gather the children and buy them spelling books and hoes,” only afterward looking for teachers “if haply they may find them” (47-48). This passage is another derogatory reference to the educational philosophy of Washington. In Du Bois’s view, a mainly vocational education “would teach men Work, but as for Life—why, what has Work to do with Life” (48). Implicit in Du Bois’s view of education is the belief that it ought to instill character and that a college education is a means, perhaps the most important means, of transmitting culture and character.

He buttresses his argument with statistics, stating that 50% of “Northern-born college men come South to work among the masses of their people,” and 90% of the “Southern-born graduates […] stay and labor in the midst of their black neighbors and relatives” (51). He supports this trend and argues that the work of such colleges is to provide leaders of the African American community and to do so through the graduates who serve their communities.

College-based “culture training” is required for teachers, physicians, clergymen, and “trained” fathers and mothers, and it cannot be neglected (62). Without it, the African American community will have leaders who are “half-trained demagogues” (62). While manual and trade training is valuable, establishing African American colleges is primary: “the object of all true education is not to make men carpenters, it is to make carpenters men” (63). Such education, though necessary, cannot be widespread. Quality is more important than quantity; “not too many college-bred men, but enough to leaven the lump, to inspire the masses” (63).

Currently, he argues, the insufficient number of quality teachers and inadequate instruction are due to a lack of funding. Such funding, in the form of scholarships and salaries, was provided for the education of white teachers. African American teachers, by contrast, “have been discouraged by starvation wages” and lackluster training (67). A 1900 report of the US Commissioner of Education stated that the number of African Americans in high school and college, while increasing faster than population growth from 1880 to 1900, declined relative to the national average. To reach the average, African Americans need to increase their enrollment five-fold. The only reasonable conclusion is that more teachers must be trained.

He argues that staffing trade and industrial schools also requires college-educated men; therefore, even trade schools rely on the talented tenth. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, while extolling the trade school model, employs college graduates. Du Bois argues that Washington’s “propaganda” throws doubt on the expediency of college education, yet his establishment relies on college-educated faculty (74). At times the idea of a college-educated elite has an almost religious significance for Du Bois. When discussing historical elites, Du Bois writes that a “saving remnant continually survives and persists, continually aspires, continually shows itself in thrift and ability and character” (43-44).