Talented Tenth

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The Talented Tenth (English for the talented tenth ) referred to an elite of black Americans at the beginning of the 20th century. The term was coined by philanthropists from the WASP upper class of the northern states. WEB Du Bois , a black author, published an essay of the same name in 1903. This appeared in the edited volume of Booker T. Washington , The Negro Problem , which also included essays by other African Americans .

background

The term came up in 1896 among white Democrats. Specifically, the American Baptist Home Mission Society , a Christian missionary society that financially u. a. was supported by John D. Rockefeller , advocated the establishment of black colleges to train black teachers and leaders. Du Bois believed that a tenth of black people with a classically humanities-oriented university education could succeed in bringing about social change. He set himself apart from the Atlanta Compromise , which was advocated by Booker T. Washington , among others . Du Bios himself included both men and women, which was by no means always noticed within the black community, which itself had pronounced sexist prejudices. Still Molefi Kete Asante saw the blackness of quite in the sense of racist foreign domination as the only differentiator and questions of gender or social class as a secondary by-contradiction.

Booker T. Washington speaking at the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition

The Atlanta Compromise emphasized the role of broad vocational education. The Tuskegee Institute , founded for this purpose, enabled craft training courses for blacks. The National Negro Business League campaigned for the professional interests of black craftsmen. At the year of Booker Washington's death (1915), the Tuskegee Institute consisted of 123 buildings on 930 acres and owned machines valued at over a million dollars. The Atlantakompromiss, however, renounced access to university education and demanded legal security, but not legal equality. He thus found broader approval in the southern states and their white upper class.

What both of them had in common was the demand to improve the situation of blacks in the USA without a separate state formation or, as advocated by Marcus Garvey , by returning to Africa .

Concept of a black aristocracy

Du Bois, on the other hand, wanted to train a black aristocracy, an educated elite, and saw this as the key to improving the situation of blacks as a whole. Talented black people should seek to improve their social status primarily through education and adjustment, and seek full civil liberties and an end to discrimination. This was promoted, among others, in the Niagara Movement and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In 1919 Du Bois first published The Brownies Book , a monthly children's magazine, the aim of which was to give children a positive impression of the history and achievements of blacks and to give them role models of beautiful, useful and famous (black) people .

In later years, WEB Du Bois took a more compromise stance that included both aspects (with regard to vocational training and university studies as the key to success). His stepson David Du Bois published about it in 1972.

consequences

Du Boi's commitment led in particular to a leading role for the black clergy, who should play a prominent role in the civil rights movement, above all Martin Luther King . The special role of sport in the American universities enabled a number of black university athletes such as William Henry Lewis , Fritz Pollard and Paul Robeson to rise to the sporting and social elite of the country. In particular, colleges and universities in the New England states made it possible for them to study and pursue a career in sport.

The American Negro Academy (ANA) was based on Du Boi's specifications. This university for black students existed in Washington DC from 1897 to 1928. It enabled the first black students to study regularly. The founders included Alexander Crummell , John Wesley Cromwell , Paul Laurence Dunbar , Walter B. Hayson and Kelly Miller . In addition to WEB Du Bois, Archibald H. Grimke was President of the ANA. Among other things, Du Bois studied at the universities of Berlin and Heidelberg in Germany from 1892 to 1894 and was the first black man to obtain a doctorate from Harvard in 1895, which was reflected in the organization of the ANA. Without directly mentioning Du Boi's concept, Molefi Kete Asante called for his concept of Afrocentrism in 1993 to train an African-American leadership class of around 250,000 men. Thomas Reinhardt assumes that Asante made a calculation error, since it was only 1% of the Afro-American population at the time.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Booker T. Washington, et al., The Negro Problem: a series of articles by representative American Negroes of today , New York: James Pott and Company, 1903
  2. ^ Du Bois's Dialectics: Black Radical Politics and the Reconstruction of Critical Social Theory, Reiland Rabaka, Lexington Books, 2009, pp. 90ff
  3. ↑ History afrocentricity: imagined Africa and African-American identity, by Thomas Reinhardt, W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 2007, p.148 ff
  4. ^ Text of Atlanta Compromise Speech
  5. ^ Atlanta Compromise Speech . New Georgia Encyclopedia. Retrieved June 8, 2007.
  6. ↑ WEB Du Bois, "The Talented Tenth" (text) , Sep 1903, TeachingAmericanHistory.org, Ashland University
  7. ^ Joy James, Transcending the Talented Tenth: Black Leaders and American Intellectuals , New York: Routledge, 1997
  8. ↑ History of Racism, by Imanuel Geiss, Suhrkamp, ​​1988, p. 215
  9. ↑ Sport and the Talented Tenth: African American Athletes at the Colleges and Universities of the Northeast, 1879-1920, by Robert E. Wells, iUniverse Star, 2010
  10. ^ Publications of the Southern History Association: Volume 9 - Page 49
  11. ^ Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change (African American Images / Africa World Press, 2003, 1988), quoted from Reinhardt, 2007, pp. 148ff