Only one percent of black working women ever reached professional middle-class status

Evidence

If the dawning of the twentieth century confirmed the northern Baptists’ goal to advance women’s higher education alongside men’s, the new century also confirmed that 1 percent, not 10 percent, of black working women entered professional service. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 210

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: the Talented Tenth was, in workforce terms, closer to the ‘Talented One Percent’ — a founding empirical gap in a concept now used everywhere.
• XREF: connects to: Black Baptist women outnumbered black Baptist men in the national convention — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 1480; Professional black women grew four times faster than professional black men — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 215; Only one percent of Black workers held professional jobs in 1890. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations: How Building a…, 288

Broader Connections

• Only one percent of Black workers held professional jobs in 1890. #qualifies (0.95) — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 288