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Book Review

Canada and the United States

Jacqueline M. Moore. Leading the Race: The Transformation of the Black Elite in the Nation's Capital, 1880–1920. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. 1999. Pp. viii, 257. $37.50.

After examining the black elite in Washington, D.C., Jacqueline M. Moore disputes earlier scholarly findings regarding the development of an African-American leadership class early in the twentieth century. Willard B. Gatewood, Kenneth L. Kusmer, August Meier, Allan H. Spear, and others have proposed that the group of black professionals who then assumed leadership differed from the more aristocratic black leaders who had dominated urban black life in the late nineteenth century. Arguing, in effect, that a new elite displaced an old one, they have emphasized the importance of the influx of blacks from the South in creating a new elite. Moore, on the other hand, finds considerable continuity among Washington's black elite between 1880 and 1920 and proposes a transformation in the elite instead of its displacement by a new group. 1

By the turn of the century, the black elite in the nation's capital had, according to Moore, given up on their post-Reconstruction hopes of separating themselves from the black masses and of cooperating and assimilating with whites. Racial segregation and disenfranchisement had instead forced the leading blacks, who at the time were sometimes called the Four Hundred, to become racially conscious and to ally with other blacks to strengthen the African-American community. As a result, Moore proposes, the basis for black elite social status changed from "their ties with prominent whites, their skin color, and their family backgrounds" in 1880 to "income, education, and the creation of independent institutions" by 1920 (p. 3). The new, more open elite based on ability and merit worked to improve the entire race by openly protesting racial discrimination. . . .

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