Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

Frustrated with a depressed agricultural economy, white lawmakers (including a former Klu Klux Klan Grand Dragon) proposed a bill in 1890 that would fund colonization efforts. Removing blacks seemed a logical way for white farmers to “increase their own labor value” (269). This bill demonstrated the large resurgence of colonization, which had renewed popularity at the time.

Proponents of colonization had in their mind a civilizing mission. They believed that black emigrants would “pull Africa out of the depths of barbarism” (270). The bill did not become law, but it was part of a variety of schemes intended to stimulate the southern economy. A plan for “ex-slave pensions” grew, stemmed by Walter Vaughan, an ex-slaveholder (270). He believed that providing a pension to former slaves aid struggling businesses. Though no bill passed, Vaughan continued to build a movement around the idea, and the reparations movement grew.

While the movement was popular among poor blacks, but it was “furiously opposed by the same class racism that had prevented Congress from giving Blacks their forty acres and a mule after the Cold War” (271). Black elites were more interested in education and voting rights, but providing economic opportunities excited them less.

Du Bois was, Kendi writes, one of the black elites. Du Bois spoke at his Harvard graduation in 1890, praising Jefferson Davis as a vision of a “strong” European man (271). At Harvard, where Du Bois continued for his PhD, he learned under Albert Hart. Hart saw character to be “the key to social change,” and praised Du Bois for being possibly equivalent to a white man (271). Keen to prove black capacity, Du Bois applied for and was accepted to the Slater Fund for the Education of Freedmen’s scholarship; he enrolled at the University of Berlin, then “the most distinguished university in the European world” (272).

At the same time as Du Bois’s Harvard graduation, a debate raged in the House of Representatives and beyond around Henry Cabot Lodge’s proposed Federal Elections Bill (or, “Force Bill”). The Force Bill would “mandate federal supervision of elections when local voters petitioned Washington about voter fraud” (272). In response, southern Democrats adapted the Northern tradition of the “anti-poor literacy test” into “an anti-Black and anti-poor literacy test” for Mississippi voters. The text, part of their new constitution, allowed “racist registrars” to ask voters to “interpret something in the Mississippi constitution” and bar or allow access to polls at will (273). All former Confederate states followed this example.

The Force Bill never passed. Though Frederick Douglass grew angry, Du Bois “remained calm and focused on the moral struggle of uplift suasion” (273). He was okay with the fact that Republicans had to give up the fight to enforce the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. This “federal noninterference […] became the undisputed national policy in the 1890s,” with “separate but (un) equal laws” becoming the norm in the south (273). Segregationism became the norm in the women’s rights and labor movements, too.

Black resistance rose in response; with this resistance, the number of lynchings also rose. Du Bois accepted the idea that this “justice” was caused by “Black crime” (274). Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass, too, accepted it. But Ida B. Wells, in her 1892 pamphlet Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases, pointed out the emptiness of the claim that lynchings followed criminal behavior. Where Wells and other antiracist feminists like Anna Julia Cooper spoke out where men wouldn’t, the “immoral constructions about Black women” limited the power of their words (274).

In response, white men fired back. But black women, in 1896, came together “under the banner of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) to defend black womanhood, challenge discrimination, and lend power to self-help efforts” in the face of racist stereotypes against them (275). Even with this progress, though, the ruling elites proposed uplift as the means to empowerment.

Kendi picks up, toward the end of the chapter, with the end of Du Bois’s European studies in 1894. He had trouble proving black capacity in the face of racist ideas. Even when he finished his Harvard doctorate a year later, he experienced “racist ridicule” (276). Still, Du Bois had learned that he “stood on an equal plane with White people” (276). He could not yet see “low-class Black folks” as “on an equal plane with him,” though (276).

While Du Bois began his career as a college professor, the principal of the Tuskegee Institute, Booker T. Washington, encouraged blacks “to publicly focus on the lower pursuits, which was much more acceptable to White Americans” (277). His private thoughts were far more progressive, Kendi notes.

In 1895, Washington delivered the “Atlanta Compromise.” In it, he asked whites to stop efforts to exclude blacks, and instead let them “reside comfortably in the basement” and “to help them rise up” because their rise would mean the rise of all (277). Whites welcomed the message; Du Bois also congratulated Washington on his speech. Some blacks, however, saw this as another way to elevate whites above blacks. Still, Kendi notes, the Atlanta Compromise brought money from philanthropists. This money fueled “Black colleges, businesses, newspapers, and political patronage” (278).

One year after the speech, the Supreme Court decided on the case Plessy vs. Ferguson. The decision drew upon what it called “social law” to uphold the separation of black and white spaces within trains (278). This decision “legalized what was already assumed by the New South and America: separate but unequal” (279). It called these conditions equal in order to quiet antiracist response. This emergent “social consciousness” was central to the Progressive Era, Kendi writes, in which “heartfelt social concern and awareness” seemed paramount (279).

Kendi reminds his readers that “the Progressive era was rigged by elite White men and women” (279). Hoping to quite “social strife,” its movements “projected benevolence,” even as they perpetuated discrimination (279). 

Kendi begins the chapter with a description of the science of sexology, popularized by Havelock Ellis. Just as Blackness was a “physiological abnormality” associated with criminality, so too did “homosexuality” become the term for a physiological “abnormality” (280). Studies taxonomizing and racializing the clitoris engaged in “queer racism,” placing black lesbians “as biologically or socially inferior,” at “the intersection of racist, sexist, and homophobic ideas” (281).

Many scholars, though, also created studies showing the inevitable decline of black people. Frederick Hoffman was one of these scholars, and his 1896 book, The Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, was widely read. It gave his employer, Prudential Insurance, “an excuse for discriminatory policies” including denying African Americans life insurance (281). Du Bois, in a review of the book, rebuked Hoffman’s claim that blacks were headed toward extinction. However, Du Bois did not “reject Hoffman’s supposition that higher Black arrest and prison rates indicated that Blacks actually committed more crimes” (282).

Du Bois was not alone. The country’s first “Black intellectual group, the American Negro Academy,” was full of scholars who “accepted the numbers as fact and tried to push against the stereotypes of criminal Blacks through education and persuasion” (282). This push, Kendi points out, perpetuated the racist ideas that they hoped to wipe out.

The comfortable separation that Booker T. Washington espoused, in Kendi’s previous chapter, was not as radical as Du Bois’s (still often racist) work. But it gained a larger following, and more financial support, from northern philanthropists. Where Washington “was ingeniously playing the racial game,” demeaning black people in order to gain money for them, Du Bois and others saw that this was “a dangerous game” (284). Racial violence surged in the last decade of the 19th century.

The nation’s growing foreign policy, which called for “imperial assimilation,” connected to its domestic racial policy (285). The US government decided to pursue “gradual decolonization” of Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines after the Spanish-American War (284). Thinkers like Du Bois, too, called for “gradual assimilation” for black people. But the decolonization project also brought on a new kind of racial discrimination: that of racism by recent white immigrants toward black people. These immigrants “consumed racist ideas” and saw a need to distance themselves from blacks (286).

Congress lost its last black representative, George H. White, in 1901. White people took over politics, just as they dominated the field of history that retold the stories of slavery. William Archibald Dunning and his acolytes rewrote the story of the Reconstruction as a tale of the perils of black leadership. One of his followers, Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, “dreamed up an unprofitable commerce dominated by benevolent, paternalistic planters” in place of “the truth of slavery” in a collection of monumental books and articles (287). These ideas carried over into textbooks, when they mentioned black people, and into popular novels.

Booker T. Washington’s autobiography, Up from Slavery, was yet another text that described whites as “[s]aviors” who enabled racial progress (288). But Du Bois, in his review of the text, “fired the first shot in the civil war between Washington’s Tuskegee Machine and Du Bois’s elite civil rights activists” (288). Du Bois took the assimilationist side; Washington represented segregationists.

More popular than Washington’s book was William Hannibal Thomas’s The American Negro, which Kendi describes as “thought at the junction between assimilationist and segregationist ideas” (289). The book advocated restrictions and separations between races while it also promoted the possibility, if very rare, of black uplift. “Racist Americans” hailed the text “as the most authoritative, believable, and comprehensive tract” ever published on race (290). Washington and Du Bois both “hated the book” (290). Black Americans called Thomas “Black Judas” (290).

The “color line” at the turn of the century was strong, as white reviews of Thomas’s text showed. When Theodore Roosevelt, the new president, invited Booker T. Washington to his house in 1901, whites were outraged, and Roosevelt “never invited a Black person to the President’s House again” (291). Amid this segregationist outpouring, Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk, which “decreed in profoundly antiracist fashion that Blacks were not soulless beasts” (291).

Instead, though, The Souls of Black Folk picked up the line of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and instilled “the racist construction of complementary biological race traits” (291). Du Bois’s idea of “double-consciousness” was empowering, finally giving language to a common struggle to see oneself as both Black (a “negro”) and American (unified with White people) (292). Double-consciousness pictured both “the assimilationist idea of Black individuals seeing themselves from the perspective of White people” and “the antiracist concept of cultural relativity—of every person looking at the self from the eyes of his or her own group” (293). Another element of Du Bois’s text was the idea of the “Talented Tenth.” He used this group as an example against Washington to show black people worthy of standing on equal footing with whites.

Critics both applauded and criticized the text. But the major outcome, for racial reformers, was a “consensus on the solution to the ‘Negro problem’” (294). Uplift suasion, especially in the Talented Tenth, would “[persuade] away the racist ideas of White folk” (294). Kendi points out that this remains a racist strategy even today. 

In the 1906 Atlanta University conference on “The Health and Physique of the Negro-American,” hosted by Du Bois, the presentations of scholars “questioned or rejected the widely held impression that races were biologically distinct” (295). Du Bois learned from thinkers like Franz Boas, a Jewish thinker who had also been confined by racist “hierarchies” in his native Germany. He “learned about the absence of scientific proof for his long-held biological race concept” (295). Boas also dazzled crowds with history lessons on the glorious precolonial kingdoms in West Africa.

The disenchantment continued when, later that year, 167 black soldiers from the 25th Infantry Regiment, “a Black unit that had been a huge source of Black pride,” were dishonorably discharged from the military (296). Roosevelt, who had been popular with blacks since he had invited Washington to his home, lost the approval of black people (296). Roosevelt only responded by continuing to blame the soldiers for the murder of a Brownsville, Texas bartender. Moreover, he took the chance to tell Congress that the cause of lynching was black men’s tendency to rape.

Roosevelt believed that schools like Tuskegee and men like Washington would change this perceived cycle of violence. But Roosevelt’s endorsement now meant Washington’s doom, and “as Washington fell with Roosevelt, Du Bois’s Talented Tenth rose in influence” (297).

Kendi turns to the anecdote of Jack Johnson, “a Texas-born colored heavyweight champion,” whose championship victory in 1908 gave black people a reason to cheer. In response, whites sought a “Great White Hope” in their retired champion, James J. Jeffries (297). The press was enamored by Johnson’s white wife; after internalizing “gender racism” that told him that white women were “superior partners,” he had dated primarily white women (298). That Johnson had “won three of the four greatest prizes of patriarchal White masculinity—wealth, the heavyweight title, and the White woman” only increased the hatred directed toward him (298).

When Johnson beat Jeffries, he infuriated racist whites. That he ended up in jail seemed no coincidence. Kendi calls Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes a kind of comeback for white masculinity. Written in 1912, the text and the episodes that followed it permeated culture through the rest of the century.

In 1910, Du Bois left Atlanta University to found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The group rose “at a crucial moment”: Social Darwinism was fully entrenched in the United States, and eugenics was on the rise among segregationists (301). People were fascinated by the idea “that personality and mental traits were inherited, and that superior racial groups inherited superior traits” (301).

Du Bois used the NAACP’s publication The Crisis to fight race prejudice based on arguments of hereditary inferiority. Including work by Franz Boas, who was against “attempts to foster racial solidarity,” the assimilationist group “saw the United States as a melting pot” (302). Whereas racist ideas, like that of the “oversexed, irresponsible Black woman” still abounded in the publication, some, like Ida B. Wells-Barnett, also responded to them within the same pages (303). The Crisis upheld excellent black people, both as ways to protest discrimination and, along the same assimilationist lines, to uphold excellence as extraordinariness. Black “firsts” to achieve greatness often “reinforced racist ideas blaming Blacks” for their inability to follow suit (304). Du Bois also became involved in the women’s suffrage movement. As he included voices from the movement, like Nannie H. Burroughs, in The Crisis, he also introduced gender racism to the magazine.

When Woodrow Wilson came to the presidency in 1912, bolstered by black votes garnered by Wilson’s vow to stay moderate on race, he angered blacks by “[giving] southern segregationists a dominant influence in his administration” (305). D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation was the first film to be screened in the White House while Wilson occupied it. Film would quickly become “the newest visual medium by which to circulate racist ideas, eclipsing the fading minstrel shows” (306).

The film “revitalized the Ku Klux Klan” and ushered in an era of terror (306). Meanwhile, black communities protested the film; Booker T. Washington, the NAACP, and other groups all attempted to block its showing. Du Bois, released The Negro, a “sweeping history” that sought to destroy myths of African history (306). It also seemed to abandon the biological idea of race. 

In the wake of The Birth of a Nation, and in response to northern labor recruiters reeling in the post-World War One immigration ban, southern blacks flooded north. The “Great Migration,” as this motion was called, demonstrated lack of belief that the Jim Crow New South was a good place for blacks to be. Segregationists responded with terror, arrests, and even improved labor conditions to keep cheap labor around.

In the north, both blacks and whites looked down on the new southern laborers. They saw them as “culturally backward” and “lazy” (309). Racial mistreatment became national, as six million black southerners spread across the country. In response, “segregationist ideas became nationalized and urbanized” (309).

Amid the Great Migration, Kendi notes, a number of people also migrated from the Caribbean and Africa to America. Marcus Garvey was one. He visited the NAACP, where he encountered a number of white and biracial activists. The Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which he founded, centered overtly on “global African solidarity, [and] the beauty of dark skin and African American culture,” and self-determination (309). It was the new home for antiracists, working class people, and those who sought to reject the assimilationism and class racism they saw in Du Bois and the Talented Tenth.

Garvey was not alone in his skepticism of biracial people and organizations, as a eugenicist America also “[promoted] the need for maintaining the purity of the White race” and “endlessly berated interracial reproduction” (310). In 1916, Lewis Terman invented the IQ test, which became a new theoretically “objective” way to prove “Black intellectual inferiority” and justify discrimination (311). Because black people did not score as well as white people on IQ tests or on the SAT, they had to be intellectually inferior; further, there was the notion that northern blacks scored higher than southern blacks because northern blacks, as a demographic, had more white blood. These phenomena seemed natural and promoted discrimination across the country.

In the wake of World War One, Du Bois traveled to the Paris Peace Conference. There, he saw that European powers discussed independence from colonial nations. But he also noticed that they treated themselves as “Benevolent [Civilizers] of Africa,” a notion that he rejected (312). He published his thoughts in The Crisis. He also founded the First Pan-African Congress in response, which gave the assimilationist suggestion of gradual decolonization.

The “New Negroes” that returned from fighting in the war now prepared to fight for civil rights in their own country. Though he initially called for antiracist activists to be patient and calm, “every year, as the failures of education and persuasion and uplift piled up, Du Bois’s urgings for Black people to protest and fight became stronger and more passionate” (314). This boldness resulted in more violence and hit its peak in the “Red Summer” of 1919. White papers called black victims criminals, Kendi writes, and they called white criminals victims. Black newspapers, meanwhile, “[played] up the redemption of Black masculinity” (314).

The Red Summer conflated with the Red Scare, and the newly-founded (1919) Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) called the misery of black people a product of “class antagonism,” rather than “race antagonism” (315). Du Bois was excited about the New Negro and about Marx. He began to move toward the antiracist idea that belief in black inferiority was an intellectual heritage, not a biological fact. Still, Kendi notes, Du Bois saw European culture as remaining superior to others.

Kendi points out Du Bois’s Darkwater as a rare celebration of black women in the period. Though inspiring, Kendi notes that “an antiracist sketch of Black women would have depicted the same diversity of motherly and un-motherly behavior” (317). This diversity emerged, Kendi writes, in the musical genre of the blues. While the assimilationist Talented Tenth rejected the blues, it was “the great antiracist art form of the 1920s” (317).

As Kendi notes, Darkwater was assimilationist, but racist reviewers still saw it as too radical. Most black readers, though, saw it as a “milestone” (317). New Negroes did not like “the bland moralizing and class racism” they saw in the text (317). Led by Garvey, who made much of the color line and decried Du Bois’s “class and ethnic racism,” those outside the Talented Tenth looked at Du Bois’s work cynically (318). Like whites, who protected their privilege through racist policies, Kendi writes that Du Bois and his other biracial and light-skinned companions also protected their color privilege.

Garvey and Du Bois were in conflict with one another. Garvey was a separatist: this confused assimilationists, who “were conjoining Garvey’s separatist efforts of racial solidarity with segregationist efforts to maintain the racial exclusion of inferior peoples (319). Garvey saw the interracial organization of the NAACP as racist, as he believed it prioritized white and light-skinned people. Du Bois saw Garvey’s separatism as racist and exclusive. Their conflict “represented a larger and nastier battle within Black America among assimilationists, antiracists, and separatists” (320). It was easy for Du Bois to “win” the battle when Garvey was arrested for mail fraud, released, and re-jailed after an emotional, years-long conflict with Du Bois.

At the same time, Democrats “came within a single vote of endorsing the anti-Black, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic platform promulgated by the Ku Klux Klan” (320). It could not be anti-immigrant, because anti-immigrant legislation had already passed with the Immigrant Act of 1924. The act “energized the intellectual struggle of assimilationists to get non-Whites to comply with White ideals of American homogeneity” (321). Du Bois supported the idea of “multiracial pluralism,” which, unlike that of assimilationism, embraced differences, yet he persisted in “grad[ing] Black people himself in racist fashion” (321). 

The blues music that represented a diverse femininity in Kendi’s “Birth of a Nation” chapter was part of a larger Harlem Renaissance that Du Bois supported and “helped rouse” (323). New Negro students rose up at the same time to protest an education system that, in Du Bois’s words, existed to “train servants and docile cheap labor” (323). The moralizing rules of HBCUs, and their limited curriculums, were objects of protest.

But some young artists in Harlem, who called themselves the “Niggerati,” were not interested in the movement of “media suasion” that Du Bois promoted, or the kind of assimilation that came in the new curriculum reflecting white colleges. This group “was quite possibly the first known fully antiracist intellectual and artistic group in American history” (324). Langston Hughes, a member of the group, pushed back against Countee Cullen, a Du Bois prodigy. Hughes rejected the aspiration toward whiteness that he saw around him and championed “low-down folks” who did not care about appearing white (325).

Du Bois could not stand Hughes’s antiracism; neither could he stand Carl Van Vechten, “the Harlem Renaissance’s most ubiquitous White patron,” for his praise of jazz clubs and black commoners in his novel Nigger Heaven (326). Assimilated blacks, for Van Vechten and Hughes, were spoiled, and distant from both artistry and sexuality.

Though Hughes appreciated Van Vechten’s work, the latter did “[reduce] Negro artists’ gifts to their racial nature,” insinuating that no work went into their music or dance (327). For Van Vechten, seeking white civilization was “running away from the greatness of [blacks’] natural savagery” (327). White tourists flocked to Harlem to watch.

Because many whites portrayed black people “as sexual, uneducated, lazy, crude, immoral, and criminal,” black elites grew angry (327). They wanted whites to see examples of what they saw to be “good” black behavior. Conversely, “Black commoners” and antiracists appreciated these portrayals for the “diverse truth” they showed (328). Though elite blacks wanted to use media suasion to erase racist stereotypes, positive media visions “did not necessarily weaken racist ideas” (328).

Despite this debate among black activists and artists, assimilationist ideas began to overtake segregationist ideas in the 1920s, partly due to Du Bois’s work. A special issue of Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, in 1928, brought black and white male scholars together to “[announce] the retreat of segregationist ideas” that had used academia to justify racist policies (329). Academia called to accept black people as demonstrably capable of healthy and productive existences in America. The labor movement, led by the Soviet Comintern’s announcement in 1928, continued to allow black people in the American Federation of Labor and denied that they might experience discrimination.

To accompany these leaps, the popular 1929 book, called The Tragic Era, riled up Democratic voters with the memory of white “torture” under “vicious Black Republicans” during the Reconstruction (331). Du Bois responded with his own history of the Reconstruction in America, but no matter how persuasive, black scholars were not going to be able to alter the opinions of racist whites.

Kendi ends this chapter on media suasion with the 1929 stock market crash, which began the Great Depression. With it, accordingly, the already-meager resources for poor black people disappeared. Eugenics fell out of favor in the scientific community, as it became “harder to blame one’s economic plight on hereditary factors” (332). Cultural anthropology split from physical anthropology, which attributed physical racial differences to differences in temperament. Physical anthropology also led to the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, which lasted until 1972.

The ideas of physical anthropology led to King Kong, which appeared in theaters in 1933. Kendi calls the film “nothing but a remake of The Birth of a Nation, set in the island scenery of Tarzan, and then New York” (333). The film helped to “[show] images of racist ideas” while avoiding ever saying “a word about Black people” (334). As a result, black critics could not criticize the film as easily as they could the popular, overtly-racist radio show Amos ‘n’ Andy. Though many blacks took issue with the stereotypes within the show, antiracists “laughed with” the characters (334). They especially enjoyed the character Stepin Fetchit, who “was a trickster of racists” (334). 

Though by 1933 Du Bois “had almost completely turned to antiracism,” the NAACP became more of a “top-down litigating and lobbying outfit” under the new leadership of Walter White (335). Du Bois left New York for Atlanta, avoiding argument with White, and began to write about antiracism from a Marxist angle. As Du Bois said in Dusk of Dawn, at the end of the decade, he saw “a complete separation of classes by race” (336).

Together with Langston Hughes and the New Negro movement, Du Bois began to petition HBCUs to include “Negro Studies at Negro colleges” (336). He hoped to pull down the authority of a curriculum invented at white colleges. At the same time, Du Bois started to see that “trying to persuade powerful racists was a waste of time,” and that “Black solidarity” should be his new approach (336).

Du Bois was skeptical of Roosevelt’s New Deal, which mostly appeased segregationists. Farmers and domestics, predominantly black, “were excluded from the law’s new benefits” (337). Housing became segregated on racialized maps, and funding for housing difficult was to find. Black laborers joined unions “to fight for their own New Deal in the 1930s” (337). Some unions, though, followed the old pattern and continued to ask black members to leave issues of race at the door.

Kendi notes that black Americans did receive more from the federal government during the New Deal than they had in recent memory. Roosevelt, a Democrat, won over black Republicans by creating a “Black cabinet”; his wife, Eleanor, spoke out against lynching. But Roosevelt was “beholden to his party’s segregationists” and powerful blacks “too beholden to assimilationists” for the period to bring the significant racial change that Du Bois called for (338). Du Bois came to follow Marcus Garvey, defending the right of black people to choose to separate themselves (as distinct from forced segregation).

Many called Du Bois a traitor for this shift in platform. For many at the NAACP, he was “slipping” (339). But the new generation, including Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, began to accept him. Du Bois “never again seriously promoted uplift suasion” (339). On this energy, and pushed out of the NAACP, Du Bois traveled to Berlin while Germany was under Nazi control. He was in Germany when Jesse Owens won gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

By the time Du Bois returned to the United States in 1937, Roosevelt had been reelected. The scientific community, including the American Anthropological Association, was turned off of biological racism after watching Nazi Germany’s rise. In order to denounce it, “scholars first had to define” what racism was (342). Ruth Benedict, a student of Franz Boas, made the word “racism” part of the national vocabulary in 1940. Benedict’s definition belied her still-assimilationist attitude toward black people, shared also by prominent sociologist E. Franklin Frazier. Frazier felt that black families should aspire toward whiteness. Mamie and Kenneth Clark’s famous white doll/black doll experiment, in 1940 and 1941, showed that Black children showed a preference for whiteness. And so, even if differences between races seemed no longer inherent, Black people were taught to aspire to white biology.

In this way, racism did not disappear just because it was named, Kendi writes. Gone With the Wind, released in 1939 to the chagrin of African American protestors, was “the primary medium through which [Americans] learned about slavery” (344). Du Bois “clung to the promise” of young Black writers like Richard Wright. But Zora Neale Hurston “was one of the few Black intellectuals” who did not bear “race prejudice” or assimilationism in her work (345). She “chose neither to glorify nor denigrate southern Black culture,” though she knew that assimilationists and suasionists would take issue with this move (346).

Wright criticized the novel, feeling that it was not nuanced and that it was “like a minstrel show in a book” (347). In this criticism, he “made way for himself” (347). His Native Son, released in 1940, “garnered rave reviews from Whites and Blacks alike” (348). James Baldwin, nine years later, rebelled against these readings, calling Native Son a “protest novel” that avoided Black complexity in order to be persuasive; it showed society’s ability “to convince those people to whom it has given inferior status of the reality of this decree” (348).

During World War Two, Kendi explains, black America took on a “Double V Campaign,” which meant “victory against racism at home, and victory against fascism abroad” (349). Civil Rights leaders were optimistic about a Carnegie Foundation-funded study of the “infant race” begun in 1936 (349). They selected leaders from a pool of only White, Europe-based scholars; their selection included Black people in his study, but excluded Du Bois, Hurston, and Carter G. Woodson. The report claimed that racism was a moral issue, born of ignorance. But Du Bois, who enjoyed the text’s assault on segregationists, knew that ignorance was not the issue. The report still suggested assimilation, this time at a level that influenced policy and established an “assimilationist wing of the civil rights movement” (351).

Kendi notes that, after the war, the United States entered a race for influence in decolonizing nations. Dean Acheson warned the nation that “globally circulating reports of discrimination, fanned by the flames of Russian media outlets,” would hurt US changes at domination (352). But segregationists did not want to see change and fought against President Truman’s propositions. “Protecting the freedom brand” was important for politicians, and so civil rights legislation emerged--supported by only six percent of the White population (355).

In the written word, John Hope Franklin’s history of black people “set the new course of Black (male) historiography” on a basis of the racist thought that slavery rendered Black people inferior (353). In anthropology, Theodosius Dobzhansky and Ashley Montagu “rejected eugenic ideas of fixed races, fixed racial traits, and a fixed racial hierarchy” (353). Human change came through “nature and nurture,” in “dual evolution” (354). But they, bolstered by a UNESCO report, enshrined the idea that even if no population “had any biological evolutionary achievements,” some groups had more “cultural achievement” (354). Differences in intelligence had not yet been proven, but the possibility was left open, and segregationist resistance to new rights and anthropologies continued.

Black voters helped to reelect Truman in 1948, encouraged by his proposed civil rights plan. He responded by desegregating the armed services and federal jobs. At the same time, Major League Baseball, the National Football League, and the National Basketball League were desegregated. Truman also intervened in the courts, bringing to the Supreme Court a case, Shelley v. Kramer, that prevented courts from enforcing “Whites-only real estate covenants proliferating in northern cities to keep out migrants and stop housing desegregation” (356). The decision was unpopular among whites.

The open housing movement, which sprung from it, led to white neighborhoods shifting to black, black residents devaluing homes almost by definition. While some urban demographic shifts led to violence, most led to “flight over flight,” as white families moved to the suburbs (358). White ex-soldiers used the GI bill welfare system to build new homes; a construction boom bloomed. In White suburbs, ethnic groups could meld together to “[receive] the full privileges of Whiteness” (358). Meanwhile, black soldiers experienced discrimination that often led to reduced or denied benefits. A White middle class emerged, Kendi writes, and wealth disparity was “blamed on poor Black fiscal habits” (358).

As the 1950s arrived, activism became difficult. Joseph McCarthy’s hunt for Communists meant that even the NAACP, proponents of uplift suasion, had to be careful. Du Bois, at 82 years old, was arrested. Despite this reign of fear, a man named William Patterson slipped away to deliver a petition to the United Nations Committee on Human Rights. It cited and documented “nearly five hundred brutal crimes against African Americans in the late 1940s (359). In response, the government found racist Black people to send on tour, lecturing around the world about “the history of racial progress” (360).

The public-relations campaign extended to America, where “there was scarcely a community” that did not promote “cruelly unjust White campaigns against open housing, desegregated education, equal job opportunities, and civil rights” (360). Though Truman pushed Brown vs. Board of Education to the Supreme Court, his successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, discontinued Truman’s march toward civil rights. But the verdict of Brown vs. Board of Education delivered a new dilemma. “Separate but equal” could not be applied to schools, because the case of segregated schools showed (this is the decision’s racist turn) that “Black educational facilities were inherently unequal and inferior because Black students were not being exposed to White students” (362).

In order to ease the problem, black children would be bused to “inherently superior White schools” (362). Kendi notes that not everyone realized that this ruling was still racist, though some Black parents demanded two-way busing that would reject the assimilationist assumption in Brown. Most, like Du Bois, celebrated the decision. When southern vitriol seemed too threatening, the Supreme Court used its right to defer action until “a more convenient time” (364). Southerners remained angry; in Kendi’s words, “they cared more about defending their separate-but-equal brand before America than defending the American-freedom brand before the world” (364).

Kendi begins his last chapter on Du Bois with the 1955 murder of Emmett Till. This was an example of what he calls the “massive resistance” to desegregation in the wake of Brown (365). A “southern manifesto” came together in 1956 to oppose the decision in the Senate and the House (365). At the same time, though, the Montgomery Bus boycott took full shape. Du Bois, then eighty-eight, was “stunned” but the “Baptist preacher” and “radical activist” Martin Luther King, Jr., to whom he sent “a message of encouragement” (365). He saw King, in his nonviolence, as “the American Mahatma Gandhi” (366).

One of King’s other intellectual idols was E. Franklin Frazier, who, by 1957, “had overcome his cultural racism” and now saw “assimilation as regression” (366). Though his book, Black Bourgeoisie, still showed gender racism and historical racism, Frazier’s leap to condemn assimilationism also led him to condemn the black bourgeoisie who, he wrote, perpetuated it. In this criticism, he reached into class racism, attacking the black middle class for being inferior and more corrupt than the white middle class. This, Kendi writes, contributed to King’s condemnation of the middle class, who he saw as wrapped up in apathy.

Kendi connects Frazier’s work to the growing Nation of Islam (NOI). Elijah Muhammad, “the son of Garveyites,” and the ministers around him “opposed assimilationist” and “preached racial separation,” claiming “that Whites were an inferior race of devils” (366). Though assimilationists showed “racism and hate for everything Black,” he writes, they condemned the NOI “for donning racism and hate for everything White” (366).

In September of 1957, segregationist governor Orval Faubus sent the National Guard to stop the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Seen around the world, this act of segregationism “harmed the American freedom brand” (367). Eisenhower worked to “keep both his political image in the South and the American image abroad intact, to no avail” (367). Eventually, Eisenhower pushed through the desegregation by sending his own troops to escort the first black students into the school.

Du Bois grew frustrated with King, for, in the power of Du Bois’s socialism, he felt that King should offer an economic program along with his nonviolence. Other critics “were soundly blitzing King’s philosophy of nonviolence,” and still more attacked his “lingering racist ideas,” like the thought that Jesus was White (368). Still, civil rights was not the work of just a few. The Greensboro sit-in, in 1960, set off a wave of “nonviolent sit-ins” across southern businesses (369). Still, such student protests expected “resistance to touch the moral conscience of White Americans,” which frustrated Du Bois (370).

Growing protests did not seem to attract the attention of politicians, even the Democratic candidate for President, John F. Kennedy. While he claimed to support civil rights, Kennedy also made Lyndon B. Johnson, “a suspected opponent of civil rights,” his running mate (369). Richard Nixon, who ran for president as a Republican, also tried not to take a side in the issue.

By 1961, Du Bois was in Ghana, at the invitation of President Kwame Nkrumah. Though Du Bois and Nkrumah shared an interest in decolonization and socialist politics, politicians like Nkrumah were who then-President Kennedy hoped to appease. He worked “to shift [the civil rights] movement’s energy from the humiliating direct-action protests to voter registration,” and he established the Peace Corps to show America’s goodness (371). Universities desegregated, sometimes at Kennedy’s orders (371). Leaders abroad praised this progress.

In the United States, Kendi notes, most people focused on the South as the site of racism: assimilationists were not racists, to most. Firebrands like George Wallace, elected Alabama governor in 1963, took up the most media attention. Wallace adopted racist rhetoric in order to win the position, though he had fought the Klan as a judge. Spouting racist and segregationist rhetoric, he “became the face of American racism” (372). But many other prominent writers and speakers espoused racist thoughts.

The 1963 text, by Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, called Beyond the Melting Pot showed assimilationism within the scholarly community at the time. The text taxonomized, collectivized, and blamed Black people’s problems on them. It also took up some of Frazier’s thought, including his historical and class racism. During the same year, Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which responded to the idea that Black resistance was a way of blaming problems that were theirs on others.

In the letter, King made a similar conflation of anti-racists and Black separatists that Du Bois had once made in 1903. In so doing, he alienated himself from both. But the separatists and the NOI were gaining followers in the face of segregationists’ brutality. Southern politicians and the federal government were at odds, sending opposing troops to either aggravate or aid protesters. Overseas, it became harder and harder to fight the vision of the United States as violent toward its own people.

On June 11, 1963, Kennedy publicly asked Congress for civil rights legislation. Following the lead of newly independent nations, shaking off the idea of white supremacy, the United States needed to shake off discrimination. Few had the courage to admit, at the time, “that the growing groundswell of support in Washington for strong civil rights legislation had more to do with winning the Cold War in Africa and Asia than with helping African Americans” (376).

W.E.B. Du Bois died on August 27th of that year, a day before “250,000 activists and reporters from around the world marched to the area between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument” for the March on Washington (376). Du Bois had long “called for such a gathering, hoping it would persuade and endear millions to the lowly souls of Black folk” (376). Though Du Bois had walked away from that direction, taking “the antiracist path less traveled,” the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins looked past this difference and called for a moment of silence for Du Bois “to honor the ninety-five-year movement of a man” (377).