The Talented Tenth

Du Bois argues that African Americans require an educated college elite to guide their future. The present (1903) is, he says, a “day of cowardice and vacillation, of strident wide-voiced wrong and faint hearted compromise; of double-faced dallying with Truth and Right” (43). Du Bois’s anger is evident in his assertion that averageness is the rule

[b]ecause for three long centuries this people [white America] lynched Negroes who dared to be brave, raped black women who dared to be virtuous, crushed dark-hued youth who dared to be ambitious, and encouraged and made to flourish servility and lewdness and apathy (43-44).

Du Bois does not condemn European-American culture out of hand; rather, he notes that there are “a million men of Negro blood, well-educated, owners of homes, against the honor of whose womanhood no breath was ever raised” who “have reached the full measure of the best type of modern European culture” (44).

He writes that the “masses of the Negro people” can only rise socially through the “effort and example of the aristocracy of talent and character” (45). Du Bois asks if there was ever “a nation on God’s fair earth civilized from the bottom upward,” and his answer is “Never; it is, ever was and ever will be from the top downward that culture filters” (45).