The Talented Tenth Left and Never Came Back

In 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois published an essay that would become the organizing principle of Black aspiration for the next century. He called it “The Talented Tenth.” His argument was simple and magnificent: the advancement of Black Americans would be led by the top ten percent — the educated, the excellent, the exceptional — who would use their gifts not for personal enrichment but for the uplift of the entire race. They would be doctors who healed the community. Lawyers who defended it. Teachers who built it. Ministers who inspired it. The talented tenth would climb, yes — but they would climb with a rope in one hand, and that rope would be anchored to the people below. That was the vision. That was the covenant. And what happened, in the sixty years between the publication of that essay and the present day, is the most consequential betrayal in the internal history of Black America: the talented tenth climbed, cut the rope, moved to the suburbs, and never looked back.

I do not say this with satisfaction. I say it with the grief of a man who understands that the loss is mutual — that the communities left behind lost their models, their mentors, their proof of possibility, and that the professionals who left lost something less visible but equally devastating: their connection to the ground that grew them. Both sides are poorer for this separation. But one side is dying from it. And until the Black professional class faces what its departure has cost, the conversation about the crisis in Black America will continue to circle the wrong culprits.

The Departure

The story begins with victory. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 dismantled the legal architecture of residential segregation. For the first time in American history, Black professionals could live where their incomes allowed. They could buy homes in suburbs that had been legally restricted to white families. They could send their children to schools that their tax dollars had always funded but their skin color had always prohibited. This was justice. This was progress. This was the fruit of a movement that had bled and died for the right to be treated as full citizens in their own country.

And so they left. The Black doctor moved from Harlem to Scarsdale. The Black lawyer moved from the South Side to Naperville. The Black teacher moved from Anacostia to Silver Spring. The Black minister followed his congregation to the suburbs. One by one, family by family, the people who had been the institutional anchors of Black neighborhoods — the homeowners, the business leaders, the PTA presidents, the deacons, the employers, the visible embodiments of what education and discipline could produce — departed.

They had every right to leave. I want to be unambiguous about this. No one has the moral authority to demand that any family remain in a neighborhood it has outgrown, particularly a neighborhood whose limitations were imposed by the very racism the family has overcome. The right to choose where you live is a fundamental right, and the exercise of that right by Black professionals was itself an act of freedom. This is not in question.

What is in question is the consequence. And the consequence is documented.

Wilson’s Prophecy

In 1987, sociologist William Julius Wilson of the University of Chicago published The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy, a work that would become one of the most cited books in the history of American sociology. Wilson’s central argument was that the departure of the Black middle class from inner-city neighborhoods produced a cascading social catastrophe that no amount of government policy could reverse — because what was lost was not money. What was lost was social organization itself.

Wilson documented what happened to neighborhoods when the middle class left. The churches lost their strongest families and most generous donors. The schools lost the parents who had demanded accountability and volunteered in classrooms. The businesses lost their customer base and closed. The civic organizations — the fraternities, the sororities, the block clubs, the improvement associations — lost the people who had run them. And the children who remained lost something that no program, no policy, no government initiative could replace: the daily, visible, lived example of what a functional adult life looks like.

“The very presence of these families during the age of earlier was sufficient to maintain basic community institutions in the inner city… In sharp contrast, today’s ghetto neighborhoods are populated almost exclusively by the most disadvantaged segments of the black urban community.” — William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged (1987), p. 7

The doctor who lived on the corner was proof that a Black child could become a doctor. Not theoretical proof. Not a poster on a wall. Not a segment on television. Living, breathing, walking-to-his-car-in-the-morning proof. The lawyer at the church was evidence that education translated into a certain kind of life — a house, a car, a profession, a stability. The teacher who was also a neighbor demonstrated that the knowledge being taught in the classroom had a destination, that the homework had a purpose, that the discipline had a reward.

When these families left, the proof left with them. What remained was an environment in which the only visible models of economic success were the drug dealer and the athlete — not because those were the only possibilities, but because those were the only possibilities still living on the block.

The Numbers of Abandonment

The economic data confirms what Wilson predicted. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median household income in majority-Black zip codes in the largest American cities is dramatically lower than the median household income of Black Americans nationally. In Chicago, the median household income in majority-Black neighborhoods on the South and West Sides ranges from $20,000 to $35,000. The median household income for Black families in the Chicago metropolitan area as a whole is approximately $48,000. The Black families earning above the median have, overwhelmingly, left the neighborhoods that produced them.

The Pew Research Center has documented what may be the most underreported fact in the entire conversation about racial inequality: the class divide within Black America is now wider than the racial divide between Black and white Americans in many economic categories. The top quintile of Black earners has more in common, economically, with the white middle class than with the bottom quintile of Black earners. The income ratio between the highest-earning and lowest-earning Black households exceeds 15 to 1. This is not a community divided by race. This is a community divided by class — and the upper class has relocated.

In 1970, the majority of Black Americans across all income levels lived in the same neighborhoods. The doctor and the janitor lived on the same block. Their children attended the same schools. They worshipped in the same churches. By 2020, the degree of income segregation within the Black community had reached levels that would have been unrecognizable to the generation that marched at Selma. The Black professional class and the Black poor now live in fundamentally different Americas — different neighborhoods, different schools, different institutions, different realities — and the bridge between them grows thinner every year.

What Was Lost: The Institutional Collapse

The departure of the Black middle class did not merely remove individual families from the neighborhood. It collapsed the institutional infrastructure that those families had built and maintained.

Black businesses closed. In 1969, the year after the Fair Housing Act, Black-owned businesses were concentrated in Black neighborhoods because that was where their customers lived and, in many cases, the only places they were permitted to operate. As the middle class left, the customer base evaporated. The barbershop lost its Saturday crowd. The funeral home lost its contracts. The insurance agency lost its policyholders. According to the Association for Enterprise Opportunity, majority-Black neighborhoods today have 16 percent fewer businesses per capita than comparable non-Black neighborhoods — a density gap that is the direct product of the middle-class departure.

Churches hollowed out. The Black church was never merely a religious institution. It was the bank when the banks would not lend. It was the school when the schools would not teach. It was the counseling center, the job placement agency, the voter registration drive, the community organizing hub. Its power derived from the presence of the entire community — the wealthy and the poor, the educated and the illiterate, the elderly and the young, bound together by geography and faith. When the professional families left and joined suburban megachurches — or, increasingly, no church at all — the urban congregations lost their largest donors, their most experienced administrators, their connections to power. The building remained. The institution diminished.

Schools deteriorated. The departure of engaged, educated parents from inner-city schools removed the constituency that had historically demanded accountability. Parent-teacher organizations collapsed. School board elections went uncontested. The parents who remained were disproportionately those with the least time, the least education, and the least political power to demand that the schools perform. The result was the creation of what Jonathan Kozol documented in Savage Inequalities (1991): schools that served the poorest Black children had become warehouses, not educational institutions, and the middle-class families whose presence and advocacy had once provided a counterweight were now advocating for their own children in their own suburban districts.

The Guilt-Versus-Obligation Conversation

I want to have this conversation carefully, because it involves the collision of two legitimate principles, and treating either one as disposable is dishonest.

The first principle is individual freedom. No Black professional has a moral obligation to live in a neighborhood they have outgrown. The suggestion that a Black doctor should remain in the inner city because of their race is itself a form of racial constraint — the idea that Black success must be geographically tethered to Black suffering. White doctors are not asked to live in Appalachia. Asian lawyers are not expected to remain in Chinatown. The expectation that Black achievement must remain physically proximate to Black poverty is, in its way, another cage.

The second principle is communal responsibility. Du Bois did not invent the talented tenth concept in a vacuum. He built it on a tradition as old as the Black community itself — the understanding that in a society designed to destroy all of us, those who escape bear a responsibility to those who have not yet escaped. Not a legal responsibility. A moral one. A cultural one. An obligation that is not enforced by law but by the knowledge that your education was built on the sacrifices of people who could not read, that your freedom was bought by people who died in chains, and that the community that produced you has a claim on your gifts that no amount of suburban comfort can erase.

Both principles are real. Neither can be dismissed. And the honest question is not whether the talented tenth should have stayed — the question is whether the talented tenth, having left, owes anything to the community it left behind. And if so, what?

The Models That Work

The HBCU tradition provides the most documented model of what communal obligation looks like when it is institutionalized rather than merely invoked.

Morehouse College, Spelman College, Howard University, Hampton University — these institutions were founded on the explicit premise that education is not a personal commodity but a communal investment. The Morehouse Man is not merely a graduate. He is, by the institution’s own framing, a man who enters to learn and departs to serve. The annual giving rates at HBCUs — while lower in dollar amounts than at wealthy predominantly white institutions — reflect a culture of obligation that is qualitatively different from the transactional relationship that most alumni have with their alma maters.

But the HBCU model is the exception, not the norm. And outside of those institutions, the Black professional class has, with notable individual exceptions, organized its life around personal advancement rather than communal obligation. The annual income of Black professionals has increased. Their investment in the communities that produced them has not kept pace.

Bob Woodson, founder of the Woodson Center (formerly the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise), has spent four decades documenting and supporting what he calls “grassroots leaders” — the people who stayed. The ex-offenders who run violence intervention programs. The mothers who organize block patrols. The small business owners who never left. Woodson has argued, with extensive evidence, that the most effective community transformation comes not from the professionals who return with credentials and grant applications, but from the residents who never departed and whose authority derives from shared experience rather than education.

Woodson is right. But he is describing the people who stayed despite the departure. He is not describing a return. And a return — not necessarily physical, but financial, institutional, and moral — is what the data says is needed.

The Cost on Both Sides

The communities left behind lost their models, their institutions, and their advocates. This is documented and devastating. But the talented tenth lost something too, and it is worth naming, because the loss explains a peculiar emptiness that haunts Black professional life in America.

The Black professional in the suburb is, in a fundamental sense, untethered. He lives in a community where he is a minority, where his children attend schools where they are often the only Black faces in advanced classes, where his cultural identity is something to be managed rather than lived. He has economic security and social dislocation. He has a mortgage and a certain kind of loneliness. He has achieved what Du Bois imagined but not what Du Bois intended — because Du Bois imagined the achievement as a mechanism of service, and the service has been amputated from the achievement.

The research on this is emerging but consistent. Studies of Black professionals in predominantly white environments — documented by researchers like Karyn Lacy in Blue-Chip Black: Race, Class, and Status in the New Black Middle Class (2007) and by sociologist Mary Pattillo in Black Picket Fences (1999) and Black on the Block (2007) — describe a population that is economically arrived but culturally displaced, that maintains a nostalgic connection to the inner city while living its daily life in a world that was not built to include it.

This is the quiet cost of departure. Not guilt — guilt is an emotion, and emotions pass. But disconnection, which is a condition, and which does not pass without deliberate action. The talented tenth has arrived at a destination that Du Bois would not recognize — prosperous, isolated, and haunted by the knowledge that the community that made their prosperity possible is dying in their absence.

The Rope That Was Dropped

James Baldwin wrote, in The Fire Next Time, that “one can give nothing whatever without giving oneself — that is to say, risking oneself.” This is the sentence that the Black professional class must face, because the forms of giving that require no risk — the annual donation, the gala attendance, the mentorship program that meets for two hours on a Saturday — are the charitable equivalent of thoughts and prayers. They satisfy the conscience without transforming the condition.

“One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself — that is to say, risking oneself. If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving.” — James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963)

What would it mean for the talented tenth to give itself? Not to move back — that ship has sailed, and the neighborhoods of 1960 no longer exist to move back to. But to invest with the seriousness that the crisis demands. To fund schools in the communities that produced them — not through foundations, but directly, personally, accountably. To mentor not through programs but through presence — weekly, sustained, long-term relationships with specific young people in specific neighborhoods. To redirect professional expertise — legal, medical, financial, technological — to the communities that need it most and can afford it least. To build institutions that replace the ones that collapsed: community health clinics, legal aid offices, financial literacy centers, apprenticeship programs.

And most fundamentally: to be visible. To return, in some form, to the neighborhoods that produced them, and to be the proof that was lost when they left — the living, breathing, specific evidence that a Black child from this block can become a doctor, a lawyer, a professor, an engineer. Not a poster. Not a program. A person.

Du Bois wrote, at the end of his life, that the talented tenth had disappointed him — that the educated elite he had championed had become a class concerned primarily with its own status rather than the uplift of the race. He revised his essay in 1948, calling instead for a “Guiding Hundredth” — a smaller, more committed cadre whose qualification was not education alone but education married to sacrifice. He was, in the twilight of his life, acknowledging what the data now confirms: talent without obligation is just individual success, and individual success in the context of communal collapse is a particular kind of moral failure.

The ladder is still there. It has been dropped, not destroyed. The question is whether the people holding the top of it will reach down and extend it again — not out of guilt, which produces only gestures, but out of understanding, which produces action. The talented tenth has the resources, the knowledge, and the networks to transform the communities it left. What it lacks, so far, is the will. And will is not something that can be legislated or funded or programmed. It must be chosen. Every day. By the people who have the most to give and, so far, have given the least of what matters.

Du Bois imagined a tenth that would lift. He got a tenth that left. The distance between those two words — lift and left — is one letter. The distance between the suburbs and the neighborhoods is one decision. The distance between what was promised and what was delivered is the measure of the betrayal. And the communities waiting on the other side of that distance are running out of time.