carpenters men," how to "strengthen the Negro's character [and] increase his knowledge" (The Negro 63 and 57).
The instruments of change would be "teachers and teachers of teachers" who "must be made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people" (The Negro 58 and 75). Their training must be broad and humanist, teaching "manhood . . . intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge of the world that was and is, and of the relation of man to it" (The Negro 33-34). He identified The Talented Tenth as "the best and most capable of their youth [who] must be schooled . . . so that they could become "the group leader, the man who sets the ideals of the community where he lives, directs its thoughts and leads its social movements" (The Negro 54).
Du Bois' concept of the Talented Tenth is highly elitist, but that was inevitable in the context of the times. As Du Bois pointed out, there were less than 3,000 Negro college graduates in the United States in 1903 (The Negro 66). Franklin noted that "educational opportunities for Negroes were quite limited, with segregated schools in the South suffering from wanton discrimination in the allocation of public funds and with struggling denominational schools inadequately supported by their Northern benefactors" (vii). The Negro upper classes largely consisted of businessmen whose revenues were largely dependent on white clientele. Myrdahl commented that "in the twenty years between the two World Wars the general level of the education of the American Negro has become considerably higher" (1005). Yet he observed that relatively few Negroes could be considered well off by 1944: "the Negro middle and upper classes are more than proportionately smaller than the lower class" (691).
Changing Character of African-American Leadership
The leadership of the African-American community has traditionally since emancipation been elitist in nature and has often been dominated by charismati...