Entry · catalog no. 1149
the Talented Tenth
/ /ðə ˈtælənttɪd ˈtɛnθ/ /thuh TAL-uhn-tid TENTH
phrase · Atlanta, Georgia; circulated nationwide through Black colleges · 1900s
✓ Verified
1.
The proposal by W. E. B. Du Bois that the ablest tenth of Black Americans receive a full classical college education and carry the duty of leading the race, as against training the mass for trades alone.
“Du Bois wanted colleges, not just workshops. He was building a Talented Tenth.”
2.
In later and often sharp usage: the Black professional and social elite, especially when it is seen as insulated from working-class Black life.
“The Talented Tenth showed up for the gala and nowhere near the schoolhouse.”
Origin & Attribution
The phrase did not begin with Du Bois. It appeared in print in 1896 in the writing of Henry Lyman Morehouse, a white Northerner and secretary of the American Baptist Home Mission Society, who argued that one exceptional man in ten could outweigh the other nine. W. E. B. Du Bois took it up and made it famous in his 1903 essay The Talented Tenth, published in The Negro Problem — a collection edited by Booker T. Washington, which means the sharpest attack on Washington's industrial-education program ran inside Washington's own book. Du Bois revised the idea late in life: addressing the Boulé in 1948 he faulted his younger self for assuming an educated elite would automatically be a moral one, and proposed a broader Guiding Hundredth instead. Crediting the coinage to Du Bois is a mainstream error.
1896
Henry Lyman Morehouse publishes the phrase talented tenth in an American Baptist Home Mission Society article
1903
The essay The Talented Tenth appears in The Negro Problem, edited by Booker T. Washington
1948
Du Bois delivers the Talented Tenth Memorial Address to Sigma Pi Phi, revising the idea toward a Guiding Hundredth
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide / diaspora
Atlanta, Georgia; circulated nationwide through Black colleges · 1900s
Spoken by
Black educators, college students and alumni, clergy, and the professional class; later used by working-class and radical Black critics as a rebuke
$THETALThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady130 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
61/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1896
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@auntiereg
Atlanta, GA
@deltasoul
Memphis, TN
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Citations & Sources
■
W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, The Talented Tenth, in Booker T. Washington, ed., The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative American Negroes of To-day, New York: James Pott & Company, 1903
book
■
+ Cite a sourceW. E. B. Du Bois, The Talented Tenth Memorial Address, The Boulé Journal, vol. 15, no. 1, October 1948
speech
See also