Beginning of Essay
The title of Gates and West’s book evokes nineteenth and early twentieth-century works: Martin Delayn’s Past, Present and Future of the Negro Race (1854), William Hannibal Thomas’s The American Negro:What He Was, What He Is, and What He May Beco ....

Middle of Essay
.... is the Talented Tenth? This time-bound phrase comes from Du Bois’s 1903 essay, “The Negro Problem,” quoted in the Appendix of , and begin: “The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men.” These exceptional men, and Du Bois did mean men, would "guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst.” The Talented Tenth would shoulder the task of uplifting the race without succumbing to money-grubbing selfishness; their formal education signified their intelligence and enlightened character. In 1903, the Talented Tenth was broadminded and big-hearted by definition. The ....