AP English Language — Mixed Skills II — Drill 1

The following text is adapted from W.E.B. Du Bois's essay "The Talented Tenth," published in 1903. 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 of the race who may guide the mass away from the contamination and death of the worst, in their own and other races. Now the training of men is a difficult and intricate task. Its technique is a matter for educational experts, but its object is for the vision of seers. If we make money the object of man-training, we shall develop money-makers but not necessarily men; if we make technical skill the object of training, we shall make artisans but not, in nature, men. Men we shall have only as we make manhood the object of the work of the schools — intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge of the world that was and is, and of the relation of men to it — this is the curriculum of that Higher Education which must underlie true life. If this is true — and who can deny it? — three tasks lie before me; first, 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 trained; and, third, to show their relation to the great problem of Negro advancement. How then shall the leaders of a struggling people be trained and the hands of the risen few strengthened? There was a time when the world reckoned the higher education of the Negro a problem of doubtful expediency. We call up for review the record of this group of men and we ask: What did they do? What has been the result of their leadership? They went into a by-gone age and dragged the best of that past into the sunlight of the present. They found the way into the wilderness of education and lighted the path. They have, in the main, made manhood the measure of man, rather than money. The opposition to higher education of the Negro rested not upon any distrust of the schools but upon an economic desire to use Negro labor in such a way that the community could profit most. The argument ran: if the Negro is trained in industrial and technical schools to be a more efficient laborer, this training will benefit both the Negro and the community. This argument has a certain force and a certain truth. But it is not the whole truth. The danger of this argument is that it mistakes the means for the end. A laborer trained without higher intelligence is not a free man. He is a tool — useful, perhaps efficient, but without the capacity for self-direction that makes freedom possible. Du Bois concludes: "The Talented Tenth of the Negro race must be made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people. No others can do this work and Negro colleges must train men for it. The Negro race, like all other races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men."