In an essay published in 1903 entitled “The Talented Tenth,” Du Bois went to great pains to establish the fact of the existence of an educated and propertied Black elite in the United States. In it, he briefly described the history of the 34 Black colleges and universities in existence at that time, and gave some indication of the status of their curricula; he reported on the total number of Black graduates from white and Black colleges from 1876 to 1899, and gave a representative sampling of their occupations, and an estimate of their property.

Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making o…, loc. 2195