Untrammeled thinking the promise and peril of the Second Amenia Conference, 1920--1940

Beginning in the 1890s, W.E.B. Du Bois envisioned a cadre of highly educated black leadership called the Talented Tenth. In the 1920s and 1930s, the first generation of the Talented Tenth grew into adults and young professionals. These social scientists, professors, social workers, lawyers, doctors, and librarians followed Du Bois's work through the NAACP and its magazine, the Crisis, through persona] correspondence with him, and in individual meetings. Du Bois interested them and they interested him. They were in some ways his intellectual children. He showed this when he invited 32 of them to discuss the future of African American activism with other leaders of the NAACP in 1933 in Amenia, New York at the Second Amenia Conference. Among these intellectuals and professionals were Ralph Bunche, Marion Cuthbert, Abram Harris, and Mabel Byrd.;The central narrative of the twentieth century---the Civil Rights Movement---misses this cadre of leaders because their actions fit their time rather than fitting current expectation of civil rights leaders. Their parents and communities focused on education as the primary way to solve racial turmoil---the education of whites about their own country's racism and the education of African Americans to join the professional class, disproving pseudo-scientific theories about the lower intellectual ability of people of African descent and providing a modicum of security in Jim Crow America. The research that these men and women conducted and wrote about established a basis for studying African Americans that continues today. Scholars still use their data sources for contemporary questions.;The interwar period had several other nodes of black leadership, including black nationalists, religious leaders, business leaders, and members of the underground market. Acknowledging all these nodes of leadership, whether or not they led to the Civil Rights Movement, emphasizes the era's complexity and the difficult choices facing African Americans born in a world where Jim Crow laws and lynching were ever-present threats.;This dissertation considers several specific topics in its attempt to map a piece of the extensive national and international network of the Talented Tenth. They include almost entirely unstudied topics, like black women's organizations in Harlem, black women attending interracial Christian conferences in the United States, Europe, and Asia, black women's role at Fisk University, and participation in the New Deal. Topics covered also include a thorough examination of the community of social scientists at Howard University self-titled the Young Turks. They created a vibrant community of political and economic debate in 1930s Washington DC as important as the cultural renaissance in Harlem the decade before or the literary community in Chicago in the late 1930s and 1940s. The Young Turks also travelled extensively across the United States and internationally. In London, they were part of the community of African expatriates that included several future independence leaders.;Societal change arrives in many forms, sometimes through street protests and sometimes through the persistent efforts of social scientists and social workers. This dissertation proves the necessity of considering all forms of change.