‘The Talented Tenth Reexamined’: William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, August 12, 1948

“I want then to reexamine and restate the thesis of The Talented Tenth which I laid down many years ago…I realized that it was quite possible that my plan of training a talented tenth might put in control and power a group of selfish, self-indulgent well to do men. [But] great moral leaders are needed […] my pointing out the new knowledge necessary for leadership and new ideas of race and culture still remains that fundamental and basic requirement of character for any successful leadership toward great ideals.”-W.E.B. Du Bois, “Talented Tenth: Memorial Address,” August 12, 1948, Sigma Pi Phi’s fraternity, 19th Grand Boule Conclave

Though W.E.B. Du Bois’s conception of the ‘Talented Tenth’ was most widely introduced in his 1903 _The Souls of Black Folk_ in a chapter titled, “Of the Training of Black Men,” it was very likely originally conceived by Morehouse College’s namesake, Henry Morehouse, who was a Baptist minister that had long supported the then Augusta Theological Institute founded in 1867 and subsequently became Atlanta Baptist Seminary and Atlanta Baptist College before the college’s name was changed in 1913 to honor Morehouse.

Partly in response to the widespread notoriety of Booker T. Washington’s 1895 Exposition Address which championed industrial education, Morehouse wrote in the Independent Magazine in April 1886: “In the discussion concerning Negro education we should not forget the talented tenth man. An ordinary education may answer for the nine men of mediocrity; but if this is all we offer the talented tenth man, we make a prodigious mistake…The tenth man, with superior natural endowments, symmetrically trained and highly developed, may become a mightier influence, a greater inspiration to others than all the other nine, or nine times nine like them.”

Morehouse’s article similar to many White and Black northerners sought to counter or add to Booker T. Washington’s ideals of education by offering differing views of how to properly train African Americans i]during the aftermath of enslavement. While it is difficult to decisively determine, given Henry Morehouse’s theological beliefs, the concept certainly presupposed a moral and ethical underpinning rooted in Baptist theology.

And this, in part, was Du Bois’s conception when he first introduced the term in the American Negro Academy in 1897 as part of a paper he delivered in the afternoon session of the academy’s founding titled, “The Conservation of Races.” For the Academy, which had limited its membership to literate and educated African Americans—including moral and ethical requirements—endeavored to be comprised of African American leaders who would “guide both the opinions and habits of the crude masses […] because the religious training of our race has been one-sided and disproportionate.” Booker T. Washington himself had been invited to membership to which no response was ever recorded from Washington on whether he would accept. He very likely would not although he had later contributed an essay that was published in a 1903 book publication, _The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative American Negroes of To-Day_with three of the founding members of the Negro Academy including Du Bois and Paul Laurence Dunbar.

All the same, in many ways, the failure to sustain the high-minded intentions of the American Negro Academy—in part owing to Crummell’s death the following year and Du Bois’s waning intrest in religion as the pathway to moral and ethical behavior—carried an unintended ripple effect into the education of African American men and women at liberal arts colleges in the early 20th century, which Du Bois in the twilight of his life, now sought to correct in this 1948 address. And perhaps after a full reading of his “reexamination of his original thesis” reveals a deeper tension—oil and water even—found in his initial attempts to partner with Reverend Alexander Crummell: the formation of African American leadership in the African American community without a mutually agreed upon basis for what morality and ethics constitute.