Talented Tenth

The Talented Tenth Thesis: The Initial Articulation (1903)

Du Bois initially articulated the talented tenth in his essay by that name in the edited volume The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative American Negroes of Today (1903), which included pieces by Booker T. Washington, Charles W. Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and T. Thomas Fortune, among others. The talented tenth is divided into three parts: The first part provides a philosophy of history that highlights and accents African American achievements against all the odds that holocaust and enslavement entail. Du Bois's philosophy of history places female freedom fighters right alongside their male counterparts, invoking the names of Phillis Wheatley, David Walker, Sojourner Truth, Henry Highland Garnett, Harriet Tubman, Alexander Crummell, and Frederick Douglass. Though there has long been confusion among Du Bois's critics concerning the line that opens and closes the essay, which refers to race being saved by its exceptional men, he actually meant (as he made clear in his 1948 revision of the talented tenth thesis) that African American uplift rested squarely on the shoulders of both black men and black women of character. These black men and black women, like the freedom fighters just mentioned, constantly seek self-knowledge, self-realization, and self-control, and they [Page 444]possess a serious and sincere spirit of service and sacrifice. The first and last line of Du Bois's essay has also been interpreted as an unmitigated endorsement of African American leadership and social development under the auspices of the black bourgeoisie or African American aristocracy. According to Du Bois and many of his more sympathetic interpreters, however, he was not calling for leadership by the African American upper class, but leadership via the African American educated class, which by his estimate of 1903 amounted to 10% of the African American population, thus comprising the talented tenth of African Americans. In the first part of this essay, then, Du Bois is at pains to predicate African American uplift on the African American intelligentsia using its knowledge of and access to crucial and critical resources in the best interest of the black masses, as opposed to merely its upper and/or middle classes.

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