Tuskegee’s Talented Tenth: Reconciling a Legacy

If, at the turn of the twentieth century, one wished to study the group that WEB Du Bois referred to as Black America’s “Talented Tenth,” Tuskegee Institute’s campus could have served as an ideal laboratory. Still, a century after Booker T. Washington’s death, scholars remain hard-pressed to reconcile the portrait of Tuskegee primarily as a producer of a submissive black laboring class with the school’s illustrious faculty and the progressive black movements, institutions and leaders in education, politics, architecture, medicine and other professions it spawned across the African Diaspora.