W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1903 argument that a college-educated Black leadership class would guide the advancement of the race.
“The Talented Tenth” is the title of an essay by W. E. B. Du Bois published in 1903 in The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative American Negroes of Today, a collection that also included contributions by Booker T. Washington, Charles W. Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and T. Thomas Fortune. The essay opens with its thesis: “The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men.” Du Bois argued that Black America needed a trained vanguard of teachers, ministers, physicians, and scholars, educated in the liberal arts, who would build institutions and lead the mass of the people.
The essay was a pointed answer to Washington’s program of industrial education at Tuskegee. Du Bois did not dismiss trade training; he contended that it depended on college-educated teachers and could not substitute for higher learning. He marshalled data on the roughly 2,300 Black Americans who had earned college degrees by 1899, most of whom had become teachers or clergy, as evidence that colleges such as Fisk, his own alma mater, were already producing the leaders the race required. The same year Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk, with its direct critique of Washington, and in 1905 he helped launch the Niagara Movement.
The idea has drawn sustained criticism for its elitism, and Du Bois himself returned to it. In a 1948 address to the Sigma Pi Phi fraternity, he faulted the educated class for pursuing private advancement and insisted that leadership be measured by character and a willingness to sacrifice for the many, proposing a broader “Guiding Hundredth.” The phrase remains a touchstone in debates over HBCUs, respectability, and Black leadership.
See also: HBCU (Historically Black College or University), Jim Crow, New Negro Movement, Harlem Renaissance
Sources
- W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” in The Negro Problem (New York: James Pott & Company, 1903). Teaching American History. Link
- Booker T. Washington et al., The Negro Problem (1903). Project Gutenberg eBook #15041. Link
- Library of Congress, “The Booker T. Washington Era,” The African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship. Link
- African American Intellectual History Society, “An Alternative View of Du Bois’s Talented Tenth,” Black Perspectives. Link
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