W.E.B. Du Bois' Talented Tenth in Pictures

Visitors to the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900 were introduced to escalators, pictorial panoramas, the Paris Metro and the first films with sound. They also encountered -- in a section of the vast world's fair aptly titled exposé nègre, or Negro exposition -- an unusual photo exhibit: hundreds of images of black professionals and college students.

Mounted to counter stereotypes of blacks as backward and culturally bankrupt, the photographs in W.E.B. Du Bois' two albums, Types of American Negroes and Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A., at the Paris Expo focused on successful African Americans who thoroughly embodied American middle-class values. These albums constituted a political act, a declaration of inherent nobility in the war over the politics of respectability and the nature of the Negro.

These remarkable images depicted dignified, well-dressed men and women living in comfortable and even lavish homes whose furnishings reflected the occupants' sophisticated taste and refinement. One imagines that Du Bois selected this particular array of "types" primarily for two reasons: first, to present a counter-discourse to "types" of Negroes summoned in the work of anthropologists such as Louis Agassiz half a century before; and second, to create a text or archive of images that could be drawn upon and vastly expanded to refute the extremely popular images of black people as deracinated "Sambos" and lascivious "coons" that peppered trade cards, postcards, advertisements, sheet music and virtually every other form of popular visual culture during the 1890s. At precisely the same time, Jim Crow segregation was being legalized, culminating in the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson "separate but equal" Supreme Court decision of 1896.

Given the startled reactions of the American media almost a century later to the level of articulation of the parade of black upper-middle-class, well-educated witnesses in the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, and similar attitudes expressed in the reviews of Stephen Carter's novel about the black upper class on Martha's Vineyard (The Emperor of Ocean Park, published in 2002), one can only imagine the surprise, the depth of disappointed expectations and the frisson generated in white visitors if they actually reflected on these hundreds of images of black doctors, lawyers and other professionals whose talents and aspirations matched or exceeded those of their white counterparts. That, at least, was Du Bois' hope -- his use of art, of photography, as propaganda.

Revisiting these images today serves to remind us both of the history of the struggle for control of the black image in American society and the necessarily political discourses into which all black art at the time was drawn. But the photographs also make vivid the age-old class divisions within the African-American community -- class divisions born in slavery, first, and then made even more pronounced by the markedly different status of slaves and freed people over the course of slavery.

These class divisions persisted despite pointed reminders such as the Dred Scott v. Sandford Supreme Court decision in 1857 and the Jim Crow laws of the 1890s, which identified all black people before the law as members of one class -- a class that we might think of as the "class of Negroes," a class as defined by "all Negroes shall" or "all Negroes shan't."

In 1860, there were about 3.9 million slaves and 488,000 free Negroes, according to the federal census, and some scholars speculate that the black middle class at the end of the 19th century -- which Du Bois would famously name "the talented tenth" -- was made up disproportionately of descendants of these free Negroes. As we can see, by the turn of the century it was of enormous importance to black progressive politics to summon visual evidence of the talented tenth -- middle-class, "college-bred" Negroes, as Du Bois would have it.

It would be prima facie evidence of the social and intellectual equality of the Negro in the battle against scientific racism, de jure and de facto segregation, discriminatory legal statutes and social customs -- in short, the prevalent anti-black racisms that pervaded American society in the era of Jim Crow.

These photographs were the visual analog of the phenomenon that Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham calls "the politics of respectability," proof that a "New Negro" existed. And the images, meant to be paraded before the world at the Paris Expo, were to serve as proof that the Negro was "improvable"; that the gap between black and white -- within the same class, at least -- was not a gap at all.

Du Bois saw the people in these photographs as cultural warriors, as a vanguard, as missionaries of cultural and educational potential. The question that strikes us today, when the class divide within the black community is so starkly pronounced, is whether or not these photographs were the evidence, in black and white, not so much of the promise of a massive social mobility for the entire race, of the part for the whole, but rather of a nascent class divide within the African-American community -- one that all of us must worry is becoming a permanent fixture of a very complex and bifurcated African-American social identity.

"The Paris Albums 1900: W.E.B. DuBois" was presented by Autograph ABP at Rivington Place, London, Sept. 17 to Nov. 27, 2010. Its tour will bring it to the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, at Harvard University.

Like The Root on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter.