In Transcending the Talented Tenth, Joy James provocatively examines African American intellectual responses to racism and the role of elitism, sexism and anti-radicalism in black leadership politics throughout history. She begins with Du Bois' construction of "the Talented Tenth" as an elite leadership of race managers and takes us through the lives and work of radical women in the anti-lynching crusades, the civil rights and black liberation movements, as well as explores the contemporary struggles among black elites in academe.

Joy James teaches in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She coedited Spirit, Space and Survival (Routledge, 1993) which won the Gustav Myers Human Rights Award; and is author of Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender, and Race (University of Minnesota, 1996).

List of Illustrations, Acknowledgments, Foreword by Lewis R. Gordon, Preface, Introduction, Our Past: Historiography, Erasure, and Race Leadership, Chapter 1: The Talented Tenth Recalled, Chapter 2: Profeminism and Gender Elites: W. E. B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Chapter 3 Sexual Polities: An Antilynching Crusader in Revisionist Feminism, Chapter 4: Disappearing Race Women and Civil Rights Radicals, The Present Future: Contemporary Crises and Black Intellectuals, Chapter 5: On Racial Violence and Democracy, Chapter 6: The Common Program: Race, Class, Sex, and Politics, Chapter 7: Captive Theorists and Community Caretakers: Women and Academic Intellectualism, Chapter 8: Elite Educators and the Heroie Intellectual, Conclusion: Radicalism and Black Intellectual Life, Notes, Index