Du Bois Photos Raise Questions of Class and Race

A photo exhibition now on tour, first put together by W.E.B. Du Bois for the 1900 Paris Expo, was an early attempt to counter racial stereotypes through images of hundreds of black professionals and college students, writes Henry Louis Gates Jr. These pictures confronted white audiences with evidence of the black middle-class, what Du Bois called “the talented tenth,” at the time of the legalized oppression of Jim Crow. But the question these photographs present us with today, writes Gates, is whether they are evidence of the social mobility of the entire race, or “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.”