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Ethics in a World of Bad Faith

Terrence L. Johnson

in Tragic Soul-Life: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Moral Crisis Facing American Democracy

Chapter Six places Du Bois’s revised Talented Tenth as an extension of tragic soul-life. In this context, the Talented Tenth is a pragmatic model of how to exercise soul-beauty—the moral practices of ... More

Chapter Six places Du Bois’s revised Talented Tenth as an extension of tragic soul-life. In this context, the Talented Tenth is a pragmatic model of how to exercise soul-beauty—the moral practices of individual sacrifice and collective struggle—in ordinary life.Less

Appreciate the Noble and the Beautiful within Us: Ragging Uplift with Rhythmic Transgressions

David Gilbert

in The Product of Our Souls: Ragtime, Race, and the Birth of the Manhattan Musical Marketplace

This chapter describes how the Hotel Marshall musicians advanced new and transgressive approaches to racial politics and representations. Their visions of blackness saw beauty in the vernacular of ... More

This chapter describes how the Hotel Marshall musicians advanced new and transgressive approaches to racial politics and representations. Their visions of blackness saw beauty in the vernacular of the masses, even as they are snubbed by the cultural elitism of the Talented Tenth's own efforts at racial uplift. Instead of trying to change the masses, the Marshall community attempted to change the perception of black vernacular expression. The Marshall musicians' strategies for increasing the professional and cultural value of black commercial culture presented a different approach to racial uplift. Centering on professionalizing African American performers and expanding the number of blacks who could become full-time professionals, Marshall entertainers expanded the social respect, cultural authority, and weekly wages of hundreds of blacks, not only in New York but throughout America.Less

The Talented Tenth: 1903

W. E. B. DU BOIS

Nahum Dimitri Chandler (ed.)

in The Problem of the Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: The Essential Early Essays

This chapter presents an essay by W. E. B. Du Bois on the Talented Tenth. It argues that the Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then, ... More

This chapter presents an essay by W. E. B. Du Bois on the Talented Tenth. It argues that the Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races. The chapter attempts to show from the past that the Talented Tenth, as they have risen among American Negroes, have been worthy of leadership; second, to show how these men may be educated and developed; and third, to show their relation to the Negro problem.Less

W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Cultural Reality and the Meaning of Freedom

Sterling Stuckey

in Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America

To W. E. B. Du Bois, the slave church was African rather than Christian, thus allowing slaves of different backgrounds to find a common spiritual vision and a pan-African identity. His conception of ... More

To W. E. B. Du Bois, the slave church was African rather than Christian, thus allowing slaves of different backgrounds to find a common spiritual vision and a pan-African identity. His conception of double consciousness—the sense of being divided, an American, a Negro—was derived from Frederick Douglass's conception that “gloom” and “cheer” so burdened slaves that they were almost torn asunder. Yet Du Bois argues that the reliance of slaves on themselves yielded art that called into question the charge that they were inferior to whites. In addition, Du Bois added, in The Souls of Black Folk and elsewhere, that the slave contribution to the nation's economy was so great that any history of labor in America should begin with slave labor. Du Bois revealed a deep antagonism to capitalism and considered socialism, with its roots in ancient African communal societies, preferable.Less

Conclusion

Felix L. Armfield

in Eugene Kinckle Jones: The National Urban League and Black Social Work, 1910-1940

This concluding chapter summarizes the notable events and accomplishments of Eugene Kinckle Jones's life and work, contextualizing them furthermore within a racially charged climate. Jones grew up in ... More

This concluding chapter summarizes the notable events and accomplishments of Eugene Kinckle Jones's life and work, contextualizing them furthermore within a racially charged climate. Jones grew up in a comfortably middle-class family, and was, along with many of his peers, charged with a peculiar responsibility for racial uplift as part of the Talented Tenth. The chapter also considers how Jones and his peers belonged to the group of African Americans whose contributions, had it not been for their race, would have been properly acknowledged long before now. Finally, the chapter reiterates the aims of this volume's overall study in situating Jones as a significant part of black American history long before the civil rights era.Less

Classics for All?: Liberal Education and the Matter of Black Lives

Patrice D. Rankine

in Classicisms in the Black Atlantic

This essay examines the contradiction of classics for all, evident in but not exclusive to the not-for-profit enterprise by the same name (Classics for All) that seeks to promote the Greek and Latin ... More

This essay examines the contradiction of classics for all, evident in but not exclusive to the not-for-profit enterprise by the same name (Classics for All) that seeks to promote the Greek and Latin classics in schools across the United Kingdom. Embodying a form like the classics can mean not slavish mastery, but an improvisational artistry that alters the form so that it bends to one’s will. Issues of access, however, problematize the simple assertion of classics for all. The realities that necessitated the Black Lives Matter movement, in contrast to a more hopeful, turn-of-the-twentieth-century Du Boisan notion of the removal of the Veil of segregation, run counter to classics for all. There have been sufficient signs within the twenty-first century of the rejection of a broad, democratic, multicultural movement toward American wholeness symbolized in the election of President Barack Hussein Obama. Nevertheless, economic disparities that separate black and white in the United States remain, and the post-Obama era evidences significant backlash across the “Black Atlantic” world. The classics is caught up in this backlash.Less

Building Black Atlanta and the Dialectics of the Black Mecca

Maurice J. Hobson

in The Legend of the Black Mecca: Politics and Class in the Making of Modern Atlanta

This chapter starts with a brief and concise history of Atlanta after the Civil War and the events that influenced the development of post-1965 black Atlanta. A focus on black education is necessary ... More

This chapter starts with a brief and concise history of Atlanta after the Civil War and the events that influenced the development of post-1965 black Atlanta. A focus on black education is necessary to better understand black life in Atlanta and how the black Mecca image came to be. Through education we see how black political kingmakers emerging out of Atlanta’s black upper class began to take shape. Chapter one concludes by examining the Kerner Report, a report commissioned by President Lyndon B. Johnson and overseen by Illinois Governor Otto Kerner that concluded that America was segregated into two societies: one black; one white; moving in opposite directions. However, this chapter challenges that by observing Atlanta and noting that there were numerous black American communities within Atlanta’s black society: those that bolstered the image of a Mecca; and those that did not.Less

Introduction

Ethelene Whitmire

in Regina Anderson Andrews, Harlem Renaissance Librarian

This introductory chapter uses a black feminist theory perspective, and demonstrates how Regina Andrews negotiated her personal, creative, professional, and civic lives by refusing to be limited by ... More

This introductory chapter uses a black feminist theory perspective, and demonstrates how Regina Andrews negotiated her personal, creative, professional, and civic lives by refusing to be limited by traditional roles because of either her race or her gender. The central argument is that Regina resisted racial stereotypes and to a lesser degree challenged expected gender roles too. The chapter argues that her social class (upper-middle) helped to give her the strength, the connections, and the tools to defy the expected conventions of her times. While Regina's biography tells the story of one woman's life, it is illustrative of other New Negro women who belonged to what W. E. B. Du Bois called the Talented Tenth—the small minority of upper-class, educated African Americans whom he believed could uplift the masses out of poverty.Less

Introduction

Howard Bodenhorn

in The Color Factor: The Economics of African-American Well-Being in the Nineteenth-Century South

The Introduction outlines the contents of this book, which is about how color intersected with polity, society and economy in the South in the nineteenth century. Much is known about how early ... More

The Introduction outlines the contents of this book, which is about how color intersected with polity, society and economy in the South in the nineteenth century. Much is known about how early Americans legally defined and contested race. However, the role of the middle ground occupied by a sizeable mixed-race population of antebellum free people has been largely ignored or downgraded. Here we refer to the “talented tenth” a term later coined by W.E.B. Dubois. The centrality of color and the mixed-race middle have also been overlooked by economists and historians. This text relies on newly collected data to explore how color affected African-American’s lives from cradle to grave. On the plantation, color influenced which slaves were manumitted, which ones ran away, and which were pursued. In freedom, color influenced who married whom, who attended school, the sorts of employment one found, how wealth was accumulated over the life cycle, and how healthy one was. In short, color was manifest in all aspects of African-American life.Less