“Uplifting the Race”

Abstract

So far, most of our emphasis has been on what the White majority, and government, did to and sometimes for Black Americans. We have also noted, however, that free Negroes created a number of schools in the North and even in the South before emancipation, and that Black churches were very active during the Reconstruction period in starting schools and even colleges. As W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in an influential essay, “The Talented Tenth,” in 1903,

They founded colleges, and up from the colleges shot normal schools, and out from the normal schools went teachers, and around the normal [school] teachers clustered other teachers to teach the public schools; the colleges trained in Greek and Latin and mathematics, 2,000 men; and these men trained full 50,000 others in morals and manners, and they in turn taught thrift and the alphabet to nine millions of men, who today hold $300,000,000 of property. It was a miracle—the most wonderful peace-battle of the nineteenth century.¹