Unlike the way they are framed in so many op-eds, modern-day activists, Ms. That is, the college campus is a microcosm of practices at work in the larger society, something of a laboratory in which AmericaвЂ™s racial experiment might be altered. She described the motivation as вЂњour sense of responsibility to the black communities who do not have access to the universities we attend.вЂќ The goal: вЂњto call out the ways our own institutions participate in and perpetuate structures of racism that affect the black communities we represent through our presence at places like Harvard.вЂќ Matsuda-Lawrence is co-founder of вЂњI, Too, Am Harvard,вЂќ a multiplatform campaign that gives voice to students who often go unheard and that brought the concept of micro-aggressions into the light. I asked Kimiko Matsuda-Lawrence, a senior, what was behind the racial unrest on campus. I hear about it from my students at Harvard, about the pressure they feel to rise, yes, but also the necessity to then look back to lift others. The class divide is, in my opinion, one of the most important and overlooked factors in the rise of Black Lives Matter, led by a new generation of college graduates and students. What effect, many of us have worried, would this unprecedented rise in prosperity have on the New Millennials? Would they heed Du BoisвЂ™s call, as students like John Lewis and Julian Bond, Charlayne Hunter and Diane Nash did under the leadership of the вЂњNegro GandhiвЂќ presciently predicted by Du Bois back in 1948? Wilson concludes, is not between Black America and White America but between black haves and have-nots, something we donвЂ™t often discuss in public in an era dominated by a narrative of fear and failure and the claim that racism impacts 42 million people in all the same ways. In other words, there are really two nations within Black America. вЂњIf such opportunity were extended and broadened, a thousand times as many Negroes could join the ranks of the educated and able, instead of sinking into poverty, disease, and crime.вЂќ But that was not enough: Successful black people, he said, must recognize that their place in life was merely a matter of opportunity. There had been, even during his college days at Fisk, troublesome warning signs: вЂњsharp young persons, who received the education given very cheaply at Fisk University, with the distinct and single-minded idea, of seeing how much they could make out of it for themselves, and nobody else.вЂќДu Bois knew, of course, that any black person at that time had to struggle to tear down barriers just to lift oneself and oneвЂ™s family. Indeed, by 1948 Du Bois felt that the new black middle class had forgotten this noble calling. He worried aloud about the growing class divide within Black America and how the consequences of that divide might affect the task of вЂњlifting as we climb,вЂќ the motto of the National Association of Colored WomenвЂ™s Clubs, describing the privilege and burden of the middle class to facilitate black upward mobility. In вЂњThe Talented Tenth,вЂќ Du Bois called for вЂњintelligent leadershipвЂќ directed by вЂњcollege-trained menвЂќ devoted to a вЂњthorough understanding of the mass of Negroes and their problemsвЂќ for the purpose of solving these problems, still so deeply entrenched a half century after the abolition of slavery.ДЇorty-five years later, Du Bois would lament, this call had been largely ignored.

Du Bois, the leading scholar of the first half of the 20th century, defined the urgency of black social responsibility in his famous essay вЂњThe Talented TenthвЂќ - 10 being the percentage of the African-American demographic needed to lead the race into an integrated, equal America.

Divide and conquer third age