W.E.B. Du Bois, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The Talented Tenth is the proposition that a people emerging from slavery cannot lift itself without first producing a class of educated leaders — men and women trained in the liberal arts, in history, in the full inheritance of human thought — who will carry the knowledge and the moral seriousness the race requires to defend itself and to advance.
The empirical ground for it was plain enough in 1903. Negro graduates from Northern colleges numbered 22 in the years 1875 to 1880; by 1895 to 1900 the figure had risen to nearly 100, and from Southern Negro colleges over 500 graduates came in that same final period.1 The thirst was there. The question was whether the nation would answer it or slam the door — and I put the consequences of slamming it directly: by taking away the best-equipped teachers and leaders, by closing off the bolder and brighter minds, you do not produce a contented laboring class; you transfer leadership from men taught to think to untrained demagogues.2
The South could not afford that waste, and neither could the race. What I did not then fully reckon with was the question of authority within the group itself. The 1903 formulation left the internal structure of leadership largely unexamined — and by implication it left control open to wealth, a contingency I had not adequately thought through.3
The danger was real: in large Northern cities I watched intelligent, efficient Negroes conniving with crime and gambling to secure the Negro vote, surrendering any serious attempt at the cultural elevation of the mass in exchange for income and position among the few.4 That is the Talented Tenth become its own opposite — an arrangement indistinguishable from the Tuskegee accommodation it was meant to refuse.
The deeper danger the formulation was built against was the program being assembled at Capon Springs and in the Southern Education Board: the organized effort of Northern industrialists and Southern white leaders to confine Negro education to elementary instruction and industrial training, to produce a mass of laborers contented with cheap work, and to distribute philanthropic money according to that design.5
Against that program, the case for higher education was not a luxury of the cultivated few — it was the precondition for producing the lawyers, teachers, editors, and physicians without whom the race could not defend itself at all. The mature position, which Dusk of Dawn works toward, is that the class-mass division the original formulation left open must be closed by discipline and commitment: the educated must be bound to the welfare of those they came from, or the Talented Tenth becomes merely a Black bourgeoisie serving its own formation.
Mass and class must unite — and a people that has had least class differentiation in wealth is, if it chooses, positioned to lead that movement rather than follow it.6
there were, in the years from 1875 to 1880, 22 Negro graduates from Northern colleges; from 1885 to 1890 there were 43, and from 1895 to 1900, nearly 100 graduates. From Southern Negro colleges there were, in the same three periods, 143, 413, and over 500 graduates.The Souls of Black Folk, pp. 107–108
By taking away their best equipped teachers and leaders, by slamming the door of opportunity in the faces of their bolder and brighter minds, will you make them satisfied with their lot? or will you not rather transfer their leading from the hands of men taught to think to the hands of untrained demagogues?The Souls of Black Folk, pp. 107–108
The problem which I did not then attack was that of leadership and authority within the group, which by implication left controls to wealth—a contingency of which I never dreamed.Dusk of Dawn - An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept, p. 146
we see in large Northern centers like Chicago and New York, intelligent, efficient Negroes conniving with crime, gambling and prostitution, in order to secure control of the Negro vote and gain place and income for black folk.Dusk of Dawn - An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept, p. 146
the Negro must be taught to accept what the whites were willing to offer him; in a world ruled by white people and destined so to be ruled, the place of Negroes must be that of a humble, patient, hard-working group of laborers... for Negroes, education, for the present, should be confined increasingly to elementary instruction, and more especially to training in farming and industry.The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois - A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century, pp. 248–249
That mass and class must unite for the world's salvation is clear. We who have had least class differentiation in wealth, can follow in the new trend and indeed lead it.Dusk of Dawn - An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept, p. 146