ABSTRACT
Race memory misleads as it fails to recall that the greatest promoter of black elite agency became, in time, its most severe critic. Revisiting the Talented Tenth, he critiques the class elitism inherent in the original concept and argues for the unique role black workers can play in social justice. The address places the concept of race leader in an international struggle for economic and racial justice. For the Wilberforce black bourgeois and petit-bourgeois male audience, the mature, pragmatic Du Bois proceeds to evoke the image of revolutionary, antiracist economic struggles as the vehicle of black agency and emancipation. The Wilberforce Address is foregrounded by two world wars, the consolidation of the Soviet Union and its regional empire, and decolonization movements against European and US imperialism. Memory can be the trickster. Marginalized by anticommunism and racialism, the memory of Du Bois’s important contributions to American democracy and intellectualism is largely shrouded.
