Transcending the Talented Tenth

Black Leaders and American Intellectuals

Joy James

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136672767
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In Transcending the Talented Tenth, Joy James provocatively examines African American intellectual responses to racism and the role of elitism, sexism and anti-radicalism in black leadership politics throughout history. She begins with Du Bois' construction of "the Talented Tenth" as an elite leadership of race managers and takes us through the lives and work of radical women in the anti-lynching crusades, the civil rights and black liberation movements, as well as explores the contemporary struggles among black elites in academe.

Our Past
Historiography, Erasure, and Race Leadership

Mbungi a kanda va kati kwa nsi ye yulu: The center (cavity) of the community is located between the above and below world. The reality of the cultural heritage of the community, i.e., its knowledge, is the experience of the reality of that deepest knowledge found between the spiritualized ancestors and the physically living thinkers within community.

(Kongo proverb)

—K. Kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau,
African Book Without Title

W. E. B. Du Bois, Arna Bontemps, Shirley Graham Du Bois, and others, Gunter's Studio, Phi Beta Kappa Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee, 1958.

1

The Talented Tenth Recalled

They are unable to conceive of the workers as anything else but workers and therefore are unable to conceive of themselves as anything else but intellectuals. No intelligence in the world can enable a social grouping to think of itself as something which must be abolished. In fact, up to a point, the more intelligent they are, the worse for them.

—C. I. R. James
American Civilization

Referring to a select caste, C. L. R. James wrote pessimistically about the possibilities of American intellectuals to move beyond the conservative functions of elites.¹ Nevertheless, this Trinidad-born radical, deported in 1953 by the U.S. government, believed that Americans could build a new society based on “a democracy of equals, with relations of a subtlety and intimacy” previously unknown.² The uniqueness of this new, democratic society, according to James, would be its unity of thought and action in which “the worker as such and the thinker as such will disappear.”³ James was relatively unconcerned with whether or not intellectuals as a caste supported or opposed this process. He believed that “the mass seeking to solve the great social problems which face them in their daily lives” would be the creative impetus toward change.⁴ The intellectual activities of millions of workers dealing with economic, political, and cultural realities, James asserts, would be recognizable to intellectual elites “only when they see and feel the new force.”⁵ This new force or mass movement toward democratic renewals would herald the demise of intellectuals as an elite that historically promoted its agency through (clerical, educational, or managerial) relationships of social power contingent upon the existence of a “passive subordinate mass.” James’s optimism about social transformation, in which intellectual elites as such “will be undergoing liquidation in the very action of the mass which will be creating a totally new society, an active integrated humanism,”⁶ shaped his ideas for progressive leadership. In the post-World War II era, other prominent black leaders in the United States theorized about democratic race leadership to echo James’s ideology on American civilization and organizing. It took W. E. B. Du Bois nearly half a century to democratize the Talented Tenth in the militant spirit of James’s radical observations made in the 1950s.

American intellectuals rarely discuss James’s comments about our conservative roles as elites within state structures. Unsurprisingly, we infrequently reference the agency of radical, nonelite intellectuals. Our reflections on Du Bois’s evolving ideology repudiating elites and the Talented Tenth are likewise muted.

The Talented Tenth

Since Reconstruction, African-American race leadership has been identified with the training of black elites based on the model of privileged, white educational institutions. In a society where intellectual ability denotes college or university training and socialization, intellectualism is tied to academe. Consequently, it has been aligned with a corporate, conservative sphere that is traditionally geared to middle-class (white) males. (Today only thirty percent of whites and fifteen percent of blacks have college or university degrees.) Classism and elitism were endemic to the identity of the universitytrained American intellectual. The mythology surrounding academic and institutionalized intellectualism worked to valorize the elites being socialized and trained.

Contemporary understandings of black intellectualism are traceable to late nineteenth-century liberalism and its conventional antiracism. The phrase Talented Tenth, generally associated with Du Bois’s 1903 essay of the same title, originated in 1896 among Northern white liberals of the American Baptist Home Missionary Society (ABHMS), which established Southern black colleges to train Negro elites. Evelyn Brooks-Higginbotham describes how the year after Booker T. Washington’s infamous 1895 Atlanta Compromise speech, Henry Morehouse, who had twice served as ABHMS executive secretary, developed the phrase “the Talented Tenth” to distinguish his liberal arts education programs and their students from the “average or mediocre” black intellect that aligned itself with Washington’s ideology of vocational education for race advancement.⁷

The Christian missionary founders and funders of black higher education, who included women in their construction of race leadership, prioritized race management. Morehouse’s Talented Tenth were to provide a racial class buffer zone between unprivileged blacks and white society.⁸ Consequently, ABHMS disapproved of black Southern students relocating to Northern colleges, believing that educational migration weakened the links between elite race leaders and poor and working- class African Americans.

In the nineteenth century, ABHMS college-trained blacks “sought to subvert the power of illiterate [black] leaders by privileging the written word.”⁹ In the twentieth century, conventional academics gauge black intellectual ability by literacy and publications. Today’s Talented Tenth seem more ideologically and socially split from nonelite blacks than their predecessors were. Perhaps this is partly due to the integrationist successes of previous generations. The select of the Tenth work at elite institutions and live in places vastly different from those of their nineteenth-century counterparts or contemporary peers teaching in urban or vocational schools. Distance, or even estrangement, from black communities does not negate the contributions of elite black intellectuals. However, as Brooks- Higginbotham and Cedric Robinson have noted, historically the conservative, managerial function of such an educated elite formed an intellectual and political leadership scrutinized and regarded with suspicion by nonelites. Like their predecessors, most contemporary black intellectuals rarely ask to what extent they intentionally or unintentionally fulfill the nineteenthcentury missionary mandate for race management.

Although ABHMS elitist constructions remain the acknowledged or unacknowledged conceptual cornerstone for current debates on the black public intellectual, most academic writers rarely refer to the Talented Tenth’s origins in the race ideology of white liberal missionary societies and the black elites they schooled. Critical examinations of elite leadership in black emancipation projects are indispensable, so why do so few black intellectuals deconstruct the Talented Tenth? Failing to analyze Du Bois’s growing dismissal of university-trained African Americans as de facto social justice agents, academic intellectuals as a select caste shape a discourse on race leadership that often uses Du Bois to validate the Talented Tenth as inherently progressive. Or, paradoxically, privileged intellectuals may minimize his later, radical thought; in this manner, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cornel West in The Future of the Race position themselves as more democratic and inclusive than (a somewhat reified) Du Bois.¹⁰ In collective amnesia, many either overlook or underestimate Du Bois’s later repudiation of black elites as reliable leaders for an oppressed people. Race memory misleads as it fails to recall that the greatest promoter of black elite agency became, in time, its most severe critic.

Du Bois’s Rejection of Black Elite Leadership

Some years ago I used the phrase “The Talented Tenth,”’ meaning leadership of the Negro race in America by a trained few. Since then this idea has been criticized. It has been said that I had in mind the building of an aristocracy with neglect of the masses. This criticism has seemed even more valid because of emphasis on the meaning and power of the mass of people to which Karl Marx gave voice in the middle of the nineteenth century, and which has been growing in influence ever since. There have come other changes in these days, which a great many of us do not realize as Revolution through which we are passing. Because of this, it is necessary to examine the world about us and our thoughts and attitudes toward it. I want then to re-examine and restate the thesis of the Talented Tenth which I laid down many years ago.

—W. E. B. Du Bois

Discussions of contemporary U.S. black leadership are foregrounded by, and sometimes frozen in, Du Bois’s early construction of black intellectualism embodied in the Talented Tenth, of a progressive leadership of responsible Negro elites dedicated to black development.¹¹ His 1903 essay, ’the Talented Tenth,” describes how this elite represent African-American ability and resistance to racism. Initially, the Harvard Ph.D. formed an “identity politics” of black elites as intellectuals and political leaders. His select, a “new” Negro nobility, disproved the alleged inferiority of black Americans. As elite educators of the black masses, they served as models of Negro gentility for the dominant white society and subordinated blacks. With their talents honed by college and university training, as the vehicle for black uplift and the vanguard to democratize U.S. society, Du Bois’s Tenth countered the image of black incivility and inhumanity. Later political crises would radicalize Du Bois’s thoughts about the ABHMS construct of an elect few promoting race uplift through race management.

Like the ABHMS, Du Bois included women in the Talented Tenth. His referents were generally male; Du Bois did not always use men as a generic reference to both sexes. In the 1903 essay, the word signifies males developing in a socially constructed manhood: “The training of men is a difficult and intricate task,” writes Du Bois, “Men we shall have only as we make manhood the object of the work of the schools.”¹² Still, by identifying women as members of the public, political race leadership, Du Bois’s sexual politics were advanced for his era.

But gender inclusiveness does not in itself democratize the Talented Tenth. Despite the presence of women, this construction of black agency remained elitist and undermined democratic leadership. Intraracial inequality was endemic to this concept of race leadership. Du Bois’s academic training in Greek classicism infuses his 1903 model of Negro leadership with a Platonic hierarchy of enthroned philosopher kings/ queens. Consistent with the Platonic mandate, those most suited for (benevolent) leadership, or rule, are identified, nurtured, and educated as befits their station. All others, in various lower ranks, are trained to follow the philosopher kings/ queens who serve for the greater good. Exploring Du Bois’s concept of second sight, Thomas Holt uses Plato’s allegorical narrative or parable of the cave, writing that neither white nor black workers “looking through a glass darkly . . . can see each other clearly.” Whites (whom Holt refers to as the “outside leaders”) are incapable of leading “the entombed.” Consequently, in Du Bois’s ideology, writes Holt, the recourse for “those within the cave is to organize their inner resources— material and spiritual—to create a base from which the entire edifice can be reformed. Being black—thereby, capable of gaining strength, discipline, and solidarity from their oppression— the cave dwellers are blessed with a second-sight into the promise and the broken promises of America.”¹³ However not all cave dwellers, in Du Bois’s estimation, were equally gifted in sight. His original Talented Tenth, with its exalted estimation of the visionary abilities of privileged blacks, presupposed a shortsightedness and moral as well as intellectual stuntedness on the part of impoverished blacks.

For Du Bois, race leadership is an issue of necessity and expediency as well as ability; the desperate conditions African Americans faced mandated the formation of an elite to oversee a community in crises, a community whose majority he did not then trust to provide its own leadership. The “Negro race, like all races,” writes Du Bois, “is going to be saved by its exceptional men.” Consequently, Negro education must further the Talented Tenth, as Du Bois viewed it, given the critical “problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races.”¹⁴

“The Talented Tenth” essay asks: “Can the masses of the Negro people be in any possible way more quickly raised than by the effort and example of this aristocracy of talent and character?” Du Bois rejects any democratic conjectures by his quick response with a rhetorical question: “Was there ever a nation on God’s fair earth civilized from the bottom upward?” At the turn of the century, for this social architect, the answer was clearly “No.” The nobility determines past, present, and future progress: “It is, ever was and ever will be from the top downward that culture filters. The Talented Tenth rises and pulls all that are worth the saving up to their vantage ground.”¹⁵ Disquietingly, though, those whom the Tenth did not carry in their wake of Ascension were deemed superfluous. Du Bois’s contemporary Anna Julia Cooper took a less Darwinian approach to racial uplift a decade before the publication of “The Talented Tenth” essay. Her 1892 A Voice from the South, known to Du Bois, argued for a different standard for African-American success, one that did not easily consign those hampered by multiple oppressions from ascension—black women laborers— to the status of not “worth the saving.”

Over the years, Du Bois revised his views on African-American agency. Departing from his 1903 essay, he writes that at one time he had “believed in the higher education of a Talented Tenth who through their knowledge of modern culture could guide the American Negro into a higher civilization.”¹⁶ He recalls that he had felt that in the absence of such elites, “the Negro would have to accept white leadership, and that such leadership could not ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• Our Past: Historiography, Erasure, and Race Leadership
• The Present Future: Contemporary Crises and Black Intellectuals
• Conclusion: Radicalism and Black Intellectual Life
• Notes
• Index