28 pages • 56-minute read
The Talented Tenth
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Key FiguresCharacter Analysis
William Edward Burghardt (W. E. B.) Du Bois (1868-1963)
W. E. B. Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Educated at Fisk University in Nashville and Harvard University, he was a leading African American intellectual from the latter 19th century until his death. While a professor at Atlanta University, he published a series of monographs on African American social life, including The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899). His 1903 Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches is considered an American literary classic and is partly an attack on Booker T. Washington’s more accommodationist views regarding Black advancement. Du Bois helped found the Niagara Movement, which advocated for the end of discrimination of any kind. The organization was the forerunner of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples (NAACP), which Du Bois helped found in 1909. Du Bois served as the NAACP’s director of research and edited The Crisis, the organization’s journal. In the first half of the 20th century, Du Bois was the most influential voice of African American protest. In 1934 he resigned as editor of The Crisis, dissatisfied with what he saw as the organization’s increasing bourgeois leanings. Indicted as an unregistered foreign agent in 1951 (though not convicted), he became increasingly disenchanted with the United States. In 1961 he joined the Communist Party and moved to Ghana, where he became a citizen. Besides many sociological writings, Du Bois authored several novels as well as an autobiography published posthumously in 1968.
Booker T. (Taliaferro) Washington (1856-1915)
Booker T. Washington was born a slave in Virginia. Freed at age nine, he moved to West Virginia and later attended Hampton Normal and Agriculture Institute in Hampton, Virginia, and Wayland Seminary, in Washington, D.C., an institution for African Americans founded by the American Baptist Home Mission Society. In 1881 he was appointed the first principal of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, a position which he held until his death. His best-known book is Up From Slavery (1901). In contrast to Du Bois, Washington emphasized industrial and trade education as the most important means of improving African American society. Washington’s essay “Industrial Education for the Negro” appears in The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative American Negroes of To-Day along with Du Bois’s “The Talented Tenth.”
David Walker (1796-1830)
Walker was an African American abolitionist and writer. He was born free in North Carolina and later moved to Boston where he became a writer and participated in the underground railroad assisting escaped slaves. He is considered the first Black American to write extensively in favor of the abolitionist cause. His most famous work is Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America, an influential anti-slavery pamphlet written near the end of his life. Walker argues that, rather than waiting for white abolitionists to end slavery, Black Americans, both slave and free, should use all means at their disposal to gain their freedom. Moreover, he notes that slavery in the US is more wicked than slavery in ancient Egypt and Rome because US slavery is mixed with intense racism and pseudo-scientific ideas about racial inferiority. Walker’s argument in some ways anticipated Du Bois’s. Walker argued for the importance of education and the obligation of educated Black Americans to teach other Black people. Du Bois quotes from the Preamble. Du Bois’s reference to a work that “aroused Southern legislators in 1829 to the terrors of abolitionism” is an allusion to Walker’s Appeal (39). Several Southern states labeled the work seditious and made it a crime to distribute it. Walker’s ideas about Black self-liberation may have influenced the Nat Turner Slave Rebellion, which occurred not long after the publication of his essay.
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