The Talented Tenth

“The Talented Tenth,” by W. E. B. Du Bois, is one of seven essays included in The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative American Negroes of To-Day, published by James Pott & Co. in 1903. The book was edited by Booker T. Washington, who also contributed the first essay in the collection. Besides Washington and Du Bois, contributors include Charles W. Chesnutt, Wilford H. Smith, H. T. Kealing, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and T. Thomas Fortune.

Content warning: As was common in 1903, Du Bois uses the term “negro” or “Negro” to refer to African Americans. Du Bois sometimes uses “men” in its generic sense to refer to all human beings. All page numbers refer to the 1903 edition published by James Pott & Co.

“The Talented Tenth” is one of Du Bois’s best-known works, written at a time when he was pivoting from traditional social and economic theories to the more activist and radical ideology of his later career. The concept of the talented tenth was developed by the American Baptist Home Mission Society (ABHMS), and first appeared in print in an article (with the same title) by the ABHMS’s Corresponding Secretary and Field Secretary Henry Lyman Morehouse in 1896. As in much of his writing during this period, Du Bois criticizes Washington, who emphasized vocational training and accumulation of capital as the path for Black Americans to improve their condition.