By Lee A. Daniels

The Talented Tenth.

W.E.B. Du Bois’s turn-of-the-twentieth-century designation for the highly-educated and successful middle-class African Americans he considered blacks’ best hope for defeating America’s pervasive racism is one of the most evocative phrases in American history.

And one of the most controversial – not least because since the 1950s they’ve been widely dismissed as having been an inbred, snobbish, wannabe-white clique with all the worst characteristics of a bourgeoisie.

That’s one reason Adele Logan Alexander’s new, penetrating biography of one remarkable haute-bourgeois couple, William Henry Hunt and Ida Alexander Gibbs Hunt, and their extended families and social circle is so captivating, so valuable.

Parallel Worlds: The Remarkable Gibbs-Hunts and the Enduring (In)significance of Melanin fleshes out this much-maligned group by focusing on two individuals whose lives as much as any in the small black haute-bourgeoisie that existed from the 1860s to the 1950s embodied the groups’ remarkable status.

William Henry Hunt was a Foreign Service officer from the 1890s to the 1930s, posted for most of that time in Madagascar and France. His three-decade-long career made him the first black American to complete a full career in that exclusive and deeply racist government department. Despite the conventions of the time which demanded a near-invisibility of all women, Ida Gibbs Hunt lived an intellectually-rich and politically-active life as well. Because of William’s foreign-service postings, the Hunts were also among the most cosmopolitan of Americans of any background – multi-lingual and of course well-acquainted with French culture, the most prestigious national culture of that time. But their broad cultural knowledge was not that unusual among the black haute-bourgeoisie, especially those who lived in Washington, Philadelphia, New York and Boston; many had traveled to the European cultural capitals of Paris, Rome, London, Venice and Berlin.

One reason the black haute-bourgeoisie were remarkable is that their very lives embodied many of the glaring racial contradictions of American society.

The most dramatic contradiction was that, according to America’s then-dominant religion – White Supremacy – these people shouldn’t have existed at all.

Whites were a superior race, White Supremacy declared. Blacks were scarcely human. Yet, by the late 19th century white and black America had long been significantly peopled with individuals of European and African descent – largely because white slaveowners had sexually coerced enslaved black women.

That line of parentage was particularly evident in the newly-developed black haute-bourgeoisie: the fathers, in William Henry Hunt’s case, or grandfathers, in Ida Gibbs Hunt’s case, of a substantial number of them fit that category. Ida was a dusky brown; but as with many in this group, William Hunt’s light complexion and wavy brown hair made it possible for him to pass for white on occasion.

Adele Logan Alexander’s own family is very much a part of this social group (her husband is Clifford Alexander, who was appointed by President Carter to be the first black Secretary of the Army; a daughter, Elizabeth, a poet, was chosen by President Obama to create the Inaugural Poem for his Inauguration.) But she doesn’t stint in discussing the foibles, flaws and cruelties those in the Gibbs Hunt circle exhibited.

In addition, at a time when scarcely two percent of white Americans had been to college, and a significant proportion were illiterate, as were ninety percent of blacks, these few blacks had extraordinary educational experiences – attending and graduating from such institutions as Harvard, Yale, Williams, Amherst and, most of all, Oberlin College.

William Henry Hunt had graduated from Lawrence Academy in Massachusetts and briefly attended Williams. Ida Gibbs Hunt had in 1884 been part of the most remarkable event in the history of blacks in higher education up to the time. She graduated from Oberlin College in the same Class as two other pioneering black women haute-bourgeois activists: Mary Church (later Mary Church Terrell), and Anna Julia Cooper. They were the third, fourth and fifth black women to earn a four-year college degree in American history.

In the parlance of our time, the Gibbs Hunts were a power couple. They knew almost everybody who was anybody among black Americans at the time. From Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells-Barnett to Langston Hughes, Jessie Fauset and Marcus Garvey, Adele Logan Alexander’s comprehensive narrative encompasses an extraordinary roll-call of late 19th- and early 20th-century black Americans who were racial activists at the local, national and, what is often forgotten, international level. Joining with blacks from African and Caribbean colonies to condemn European colonialism, via the several Pan-African Congresses held from the 1890s to the 1920s, and other ventures, was as important to the black haute-bourgeois activists as fighting against the increasingly restrictive racist practices in the North.

This latter point offers a roadmap to the proper consideration of the black haute-bourgeoisie of this era.

First, Parallel Worlds underscores from a different angle how disregarded black Americans as a group were.

Second, it reinforces the notion that, rather than the “Talented Tenth,” this group should be called the “Fortunate Tenth.” Yes, of course, they were fully equal, if not superior, to their white counterparts in intelligence, resourcefulness and determination (lacking only the great wealth). But, most of all, they were extraordinarily fortunate in having been able to forge the lives they led when the great mass of black Americans lived at a subsistence level.

And, it must be acknowledged, as another example of the complexity of their situation, they were able to do so because American society, for all its racist character, allowed them enough opportunity to do so.

Third, albeit the class differences (and the black haute-bourgeoisie who did fit the stereotype), blacks like the Gibbs Hunts understood their destiny was tied to that of the black masses in the US and abroad. Their commitment to be “race men” and “race women” was lifelong.

Fourth, that meant they were in fact allied with the nascent movement among the black masses, coordinated principally by the fledgling NAACP, to challenge America’s racist practices in the North as well as the South.

Those two intra-group movements, which to some extent operated on parallel tracks through the first half of the twentieth century, finally came together in the aftermath of the 1954 Brown decision as the Civil Rights Movement that would finally destroy overtly legalized racism in America.

Parallel Worlds proves that the black haute-bourgeoisie of a bygone era – the Fortunate Tenth – deserves to be on the honor roll of those who helped bring that about.