Educated black leaders policed a cultural divide against folk religious practice

Evidence

During the last three decades of the nineteenth century, the Home Mission schools had trained men and women to become cognizant of cultural bifurcation within the black church itself. The men and women of the Talented Tenth acknowledged that one cultural form, which they themselves represented, embraced educated ministers and laypersons who sought to employ intellect and skill on behalf of the race. The second, represented by the illiterate masses, consisted of “crude and undeveloped” believers who adhered to emotionalism and “superstition” and exhibited no knowledge or interest in temperance, education, and Victorian morality. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 226

Categorization

• XREF: Central mechanics of the respectability project: an intra-racial elite defining itself against the ‘crude’ masses — echoes Bourdieu-style distinction and the politics of respectability concept the book coins. — connects to: Black educated leaders used print literacy to undercut illiterate preachers’ authority — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 230; Educated black elites were trained as a mediating restraint against mass violence — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 154; Free Black elites formed a separate leadership tradition predating Marxism (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Black middle-class advancement sharpened cultural divisions within black society #expands (0.82) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 224
• Charismatic-leader narratives erased the grassroots machinery of the Black freedom struggle #complicates (0.78)
• Free Black elites formed a separate leadership tradition predating Marxism #expands (0.72)
• Black Baptist church leaders were Gramscian organic intellectuals rooted among the masses #contradicts (0.72) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 242
• Cultural and political shifts can racialize religious identity #expands (0.70) — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 150
• Culture served as a racializing mode that displaced politics onto religion #expands (0.70) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 256