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TheTalented Tenth

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WEB Du Bois believed the Talented Tenth would bring racial equality to African Americans. Soon after the Atlanta Compromise, Du Bois challenged Booker T. Washington's idea of racial uplift because it rejected superior academic education for their race. Du Bois wrote in September 1903, “The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst.” Training Negro men in how to make money via economic uplift would only create moneymakers. Instead, Negroes should develop the whole man. Schools should teach “intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge of the world that was and is, and of the relation of men to it.”
He criticized Booker T. Washington by writing, “To say that the Negro leadership should have begun at the plow and not at the Senate is a foolish and mischievous lie.” Du Bois argued that 250 years of toiling at the plow had gained the black man nothing, only the (Civil) war amendments brought about change. The black man will toil another 250 years and still have nothing if he does not have political rights and civic status. Lynching, raping, crushing of youth, and flourishing lewdness and servility had not crushed the black man because an exceptional few survived. Those few had shown themselves in “thrift ability and character.” The quality of those few should not be belittled. Du Bois claimed that culture would always seep from the top downward. “The Talented Tenth rises and pulls all that are worth saving up to their vantage ground.” To achieve this, the best and most capable young people should receive a liberal arts education at colleges and universities.

 

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  1. W.E.B. Du Bois Maureen Gray

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