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Joy James, Transcending the Talented Tenth: Black Leaders and American Intellectuals (1997)
She begins with Du Bois' construction of "the Talented Tenth" as elite leadership of race managers & takes us through the lives & work of radical women in anti-lynching crusades, civil rights & black liberation movements, & contemporary struggles among black elites in academia.
chapter 1 — The Talented Tenth Recalled
excerpts
“Since Reconstruction, African-American race leadership has been identified with the training of black elites based on the model of privileged, white educational institutions.
excerpts
“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 [1997] only thirty percent of whites and fifteen per- cent of blacks have college or university degrees.) Classism and elitism were endemic to the identity of the university-trained American intellectual.
The mythology surrounding academic and institutionalized intellectualism worked to valorize the elites being socialized and trained.”
“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 Horne Missionary Society (ABHMS), which established Southern black colleges to train Negro elites.”
excerpt, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920
origins of talented tenth in white liberal paternalism and fear of Black revolt and militancy!! henry lyman morehouse namesake of morehouse college white supremacist
origins of talented tenth in white liberal paternalism and fear of Black revolt and militancy!! henry lyman morehouse namesake of morehouse college white supremacist
“In 1896…Henry Morehouse, executive secretary of the ABHMS from 1879 to 1893 and from 1902 to 1917, coined the term Talented Tenth in order to distinguish the work of his society from that which catered to average or mediocre intellect.
…Morehouse proclaimed:
…Industrial education is good for the nine; the common English branches are good for the nine; that tenth man ought to have the best opportunities for making the most of himself for humanity and God.”
…Industrial education is good for the nine; the common English branches are good for the nine; that tenth man ought to have the best opportunities for making the most of himself for humanity and God.”
“Through the Talented Tenth, northern white Baptists hoped to transform—albeit indirectly—the illiterate and impoverished black masses into American citizens who valued education, industriousness, piety, and refined manners.
Rather than tackle the cost of mass education, the ABHMS channeled its energies into the formation of a black elite that would serve and lead its own community…
For the ABHMS, the explicit goal of preparing blacks for citizenship entailed an alliance with black leaders who had imbibed white middle-class values and commanded the respect and following of their own people.”
“Through the black educated elite, the degraded masses would be introduced to the values of white, middle-class Protestant America…
In 1871, the society stated that the work of establishing schools was beneficial ‘not to the colored race alone, but to the white race of this land.’
From the northern Baptists’ perspective, a well-educated black vanguard constituted a buffer between white society and the black masses. It appeared axiomatic that properly trained black leaders held the key to the ‘peaceful solution’ of the race problem.
According to George Sale, the Talented Tenth was intellectually and socially broader than uneducated or half-educated demagogues who appeared more inclined to a militant and extremist position vis-a-vis white America.
Morehouse concurred in the effort to create what he termed the ‘colored American Yankee.’ He advocated racial equality while ever mindful of blacks’ potential for violent retaliation against continued injustice.
‘For the sake of the land we love,’ he pleaded on behalf of higher education, ‘we must finish this work, or the problem will be, not, "What shall we do with the negro?" but "What will the negro do with us?"”
Joy James, Transcending the Talented Tenth: Black Leaders and American Intellectuals (1997) chapter 1 — The Talented Tenth Recalled
further excerpts
further excerpts
“Like their predecessors, most contemporary black intellectuals rarely ask to what extent they intentionally or unintentionally fulfill the nineteenth-century missionary mandate for race management.”
“[David] Du Bois recalls that in 1972, after a twelve-year African sojourn from U.S. racism, he welcomed Black Panther Party newspaper editor [Ericka] Huggins's invitation for a feature article on his stepfather.
Considering this an excellent opportunity to educate about W. E. B. Du Bois's rejection of an elite Talented Tenth, the younger Du Bois wrote of
‘Dr, Du Bois' conviction that it's those who suffered most and have the least to lose that we should look to for our steadfast, dependable and uncompromising leadership.’
When his article appeared in the Black Panther paper's December issue, all references to the senior Du Bois's rejection of the Talented Tenth were deleted, according to David Du Bois, who suggests that the Panther leaders sought to hold on to vanguard elitism.”
chapter 8 Elite Educators and the Heroic Intellectual excerpts
“On one hand we have an educated elite and elite educators with access to academe (and its resources) and the students privileged to enter.
“On one hand we have an educated elite and elite educators with access to academe (and its resources) and the students privileged to enter.
On the other hand we have nonelites who, since the 1970s, have faced growing barriers to their access to the university as the traditional training site for the Talented Tenth, and a source of economic as well as social mobility.
Generally, it is the university-educated as consumers who purchase the products of academics or elite educators; elites who respond to the educated consumer's demands for information and entertainment gain popularity and profit.
Educated elites may as well become regulated by production that meets the consumer's curiosity for fetishized blackness. A diverse group,
educated consumers still tend to share an attraction for black intellectualism as entertainment and an aversion for nonentertaining knowledge produced by nonelites that indicts both elites and consumers as complicitous in, or indifferent to, the reproduction of inequality.”
George Sale, “The Education of the Negro,” BHMM, 20 (October 1898)- 345-348. white supremacist talented tenth advocate fear of Black revolt there is no peaceful solution!!
“…if we will do anything for or with the Negro we must do it through Negro men and women. I venture the assertion that the educated leaders of the Negro people—
and by educated leaders I mean those who have learned to think deeply, soberly and broadly upon the questions involved in the progress of their race—are doing most on their side for the peaceful solution of these questions.
It is not the educated leader that we have to fear, but the naturally gifted, uneducated or half-educated demagogue who is inflammable in his utterances, and who would lead his people into extremes of every sort.”
the post plantation control and counterinsurgency
the post plantation control and counterinsurgency
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