Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century
Publisher: Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
Publication Website: https://www.uncpress.org/book/9780807845431/uplifting-the-race/
Coverage: 1v. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996
Additional Information: Amidst the violent racism prevalent at the turn of the twentieth century, African American cultural elites, struggling to articulate a positive black identity, developed a middle-class ideology of racial uplift. Insisting that they were truly representative of the race's potential, black elites espoused an ethos of self-help and service to the black masses and distinguished themselves from the black majority as agents of civilization; hence the phrase 'uplifting the race.'