28 pages • 56 minutes read
W. E. B. Du BoisThe Talented Tenth
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1903A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Educational Policy
The most important theme in “The Talented Tenth” is educational policy. In 1903 the legacy of slavery and aftermath of the Civil War still dominated African American life, especially since many African Americans (such as Booker T. Washington) were former slaves. African Americans had, for the most part, been denied education of any kind until after 1865. In Du Bois’s time, education was seen by virtually all Black people as a vital element in the improvement of their condition. Several African American colleges were founded in the years after the Civil War, but the number of students and graduates lagged what was needed to lead African Americans to full participation in American society. Du Bois’s views on this issue echo previous examinations of the role of education, most directly that of Henry Lyman Morehouse and the American Baptist Home Mission Society (ABHMS). Morehouse’s treatment of this issue was published under the same title “The Talented Tenth” in 1896. He argues that only the college education of the most talented African Americans will produce an improvement in Black social reality. Such well-educated persons will naturally assume leadership roles in society. This theme is announced in the title, the first sentence, and the last sentence of Du Bois’s essay.
Du Bois argues against an alternative vision of education based on broad-based technical, trade, and vocational training. The primary advocate of such education was Washington, the Principal of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama. Washington argued that African Americans need industrial and trade training to generate wealth and improve their lives. In “Industrial Education for the Negro,” the first essay in The Negro Problem (Du Bois’s “The Talented Tenth” immediately follows), Washington states that pre-Civil War “business contact” with white people and the “industrial training on the plantations” left African Americans at the close of the Civil War “in possession of nearly all the common and skilled labor in the South” (12). The agricultural and mechanical expertise of antebellum African Americans was being lost because the “value of the industrial training given by the plantations was overlooked.” Consequently, “Negro men and women were educated in literature, in mathematics and in the sciences, with little thought of what had been taking place during the preceding two hundred and fifty years” (12). For Washington, education in ancestral skills and practical trades should not be jettisoned in favor of an education that did not provide a means of accumulating wealth through technical and business expertise.
Du Bois counters by saying that the view that African American “leadership should have begun at the plow and not in the Senate” is “a foolish and mischievous lie.” He argues that “two hundred and fifty years” of toil was “in vain” and “the half-free serf of to-day may toil at his plow, but unless he have political rights and righteously guarded civic status, he will still remain the poverty-stricken and ignorant plaything of rascals” (42-43).
Du Bois and Washington recognized that both college education and trade education were necessary. Their debate centers on which should be primary. For Du Bois, an educated elite was of primary importance not for jobs but for what Du Bois calls “manhood,” the object of which he defines as “intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge of the world” (33-34) He writes that a university education transmits “knowledge and culture from generation to generation, through the training of quick minds and pure hearts” (46). Trained in this way, the African American talented tenth could reach “the full measure of the best type of modern European culture” (44). In his view, there are simply insufficient numbers of African American college-educated leaders. He believes that the education of such leaders must be the priority.
The Necessity of Elitism
Du Bois’s vision of education and the social advancement of African American society is elitist. He argues that the salvation of the race will only occur if the talented tenth is college educated and enabled to assume leadership in the community. On this view, benefits will seep down through society from the top. He argues that without such an elite, the “half-free serf of to-day” will remain a serf for the next 250 years (43). Salvation will be accomplished by the race’s “exceptional men” (33). The race (indeed all races) consists of what he calls the “Best,” the “Mass,” and the “Worst,” and the educational support of the Best is vital to the health of society (33). In examining the African American experience, Du Bois lists and quotes from the elite members of the past, and nearly all are the few educated African Americans of their time. The African American elite of past eras was trained at “famous foreign universities,” the “colored schools of New York and Philadelphia and Boston, taught by college-bred men” (42). He says that such educated men “strove by word and deed to save the color line from becoming the line between the bond and free” (37).
He argues that so few African Americans are college educated (in 1903) because of the legacy of unjust laws and discrimination by white society. This injustice prevents the talented tenth from achieving its potential, and although great strides in educating the elite have been achieved, such efforts remain inadequate. He understands a college education as teaching more than mere vocations. He says that “knowledge of life and its wider meaning” has been the African American’s “deepest ignorance” (55). Only teachers with more than “bread winning” training can transmit “human culture” (55).
Even in an age that Du Bois calls a time of “cowardice and vacillation,” the “exceptions” continue to lead the African American community. Du Bois derides those who extoll the “Average,” arguing that “a saving remnant continually survives and persists” (44). He says the “aristocracy of talent and character […] rises and pulls all that are worth saving up to their vantage ground” (45). The education Du Bois champions is “not simply a matter of schools; it is much more a matter of family and group life” (61). He posits that college provides not only knowledge but character formation as well.
His elitist view of human society extends beyond education and the African American community. He argues that all societal improvement has been and will be “from the top downward.” This is “the history of human progress” (45). Two “historic mistakes” are that “no more could ever rise save the few already risen” and that “it would better the unrisen to pull the risen down” (45). He argues that the African American community does not require “a quantity of such colleges” nor “too many college-bred men,” but only enough to “leaven the lump” (63).
Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism, a popular theory in Du Bois’s time, applies Charles Darwin’s biological theories of natural selection and survival of the fittest to the social realm. Social Darwinism lends itself to elitist beliefs, for it assumes that some persons are more adapted to their environment (that is, are more “fit”) and thus will almost automatically be more successful politically, economically, and personally if artificial barriers are removed.
The essay begins by discussing three classes of people: the “Best,” the “Mass,” and the “Worst” (33). Embedded in this schema is the idea that these categories are to some extent unchangeable. Du Bois argues that the “Best” must be educated for leadership, but he never entertains the possibility that the “Mass” or the “Worst” are capable of becoming members of the elite. Society’s resources, especially in higher education, should be directed toward the “fittest.” The group is more important than any individual, and the group’s health depends on the talented tenth.
Du Bois calls slavery the “legalized survival of the unfit” (35). One reason for agitating for the end of slavery is to “make way for natural selection and the survival of the fittest” (35). Those African Americans who have the potential to be in the talented tenth are unjustly suppressed by slavery and racial discrimination. In discussing African American leadership after emancipation, Du Bois speaks of the importance of “political organization, historical and polemical writing and moral regeneration” (42)—tasks that he believes only the elite or the fittest can render to African American society. Without political rights “righteously guarded,” the naturally fittest of African American society will languish as “ignorant playthings of rascals” (43). The prevalent worship of the average (which Du Bois calls “death, disease and crime”), a “saving remnant continually survives and persists” (43-44).
In the modern world, education is necessary for societal “survival of the fittest.” Without leaders equipped to survive and to help the community survive, the community will languish. The leadership tools necessary for survival in the modern world are acquired through education, especially college education.
Education and Race
While Du Bois argues that college-educated leaders are necessary for all social and racial groups, the African American community has unique issues related to its history. He says that educated and intelligent African Americans “have led and elevated the mass,” and the “sole obstacles that nullified and retarded their efforts were slavery and race prejudice” (34). Such leaders existed in the past but were too few and too hampered by legal restrictions to rise to their natural abilities. Quoting Benjamin Banneker’s 1791 letter to Thomas Jefferson in which Banneker reminded Jefferson of the Declaration of Independence’s self-evident truth that “all men are created equal,” Du Bois reminds his readers that more than 100 years later America still does not fully recognize this self-evident truth (37). Up to the Civil War, the African American elite was obliged to fight slavery and to engage in this fight with few of the educational opportunities afforded the white community. Quoting David Walker, he writes, “Does not the blood of our fathers and of us, their children, cry aloud to the Lord of Sabaoth against you for the cruelties and murders with which you have and do continue to afflict us?” (39). The National Negro Convention was an attempt to address these issues. Du Bois argues that “too little notice has been taken of the work which the talented tenth among Negroes took in the great abolition crusade” (40). White people such as William Lloyd Garrison and Charles Sumner are often more remembered than African Americans who fought for abolition. He argues that college-educated men were the main drivers of abolition.
He then contends that the quickest and most efficient way to raise the masses is by “the effort and example of this aristocracy of talent and character” (45). Du Bois argues that even with the legal and discriminatory realities that African Americans have suffered, “one million men of Negro blood” have “reached the full measure of the best type of modern European culture” (44). He says, “The best and most capable of the youth” must be college educated (45).
Although at times Du Bois stresses the almost mystical value and character-building qualities of college education for African American society, he prescribes no particular curriculum or educational techniques. This facet of his argument is idealist, asserting that a “university is a human invention for the transmission of knowledge and culture,” training “quick minds and pure hearts” (46). He adds, “No other human invention will suffice, not even trade and industrial schools” (46).
When Du Bois examines statistics, he finds that college-educated African Americans are primarily teachers, clergymen, physicians, lawyers, and others (others less than 15%). These statistics demonstrate that the “college-bred” African American is “the group leader, the man who sets the ideals of the community […] directs its thoughts and heads its social movements” (54). Such leaders are especially important for the African American community because it has “no traditions to fall back upon, no long established customs, no strong family ties, no well defined social classes” (54). College education will replace the traditions and long history of European and American elites.
