Book Review

In Leading the Race, Jacqueline M. Moore traces the evolution of Washington's black elite from a "nineteenth-century aristocracy" whose members were obsessed with maintaining their individual social status to a "twentieth-century leadership class" united in its desire to uplift the entire race. By considering generational change within elite families, churches, schools, businesses, and professional and fraternal organizations from the post-Reconstruction period to the aftermath of World War I, Moore demonstrates in detail how Washington's wealthiest and best-educated black families dealt with the onset and entrenchment of Jim Crow. No longer able to aspire realistically to integration into white society, the black elite had to turn for status and support to the black community it had once eschewed. By doing so, its members sought increasingly to create autonomous black-controlled institutions and became increasingly militant in their protest against the growing discrimination they and all African Americans faced in employment and public accommodations.

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