Blackwell Reference Online

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At crucial moments in a people's history, the question “What is to be done?” is raised. Alongside this question, additional questions will follow, such as “Who will do it, when, and how?” When one explores such works as Plato's Republic , Machiavelli's The Prince , Comte's Course in Positive Philosophy , and Marx's Communist Manifesto , one is deeply aware of the sense of crisis expressed by the writers and the urgency with which they raised the questions posed above. One must therefore understand the responses to group or national crises and the urgency of responses to such crises before fully understanding W. E. B. Du Bois's own urgent response to the national crisis of race, and to the many ways in which the crisis was more pronounced and devastating to blacks. Du Bois first proposed a highly visible role for the educated segment of the black population in an article entitled “The Talented Tenth” (1903), and throughout his long life, at least until the 1950s, his life and the organizational and institutional networks he constructed both amplified and represented the importance of the role of the educated. But what was successful in practice was, however, not quite as successful when it came to justifying the theory. In fact, Du Bois's theory was attacked from two main quarters. First, Booker T. Washington criticized the usefulness of those who had devoted much of their life ... log in or subscribe to read full text