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

by Ibram X. Kendi

Yet even with a voting rights bill, the United States would not be finished, President Johnson had the courage to declare in his commencement address to Howard University graduates in June. “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains[,] and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” It was quite possibly the most antiracist avowal ever uttered from the lips of a US president. And Johnson was just getting started. “We seek not just freedom but opportunity,” he said. “We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.” Racial progress had come primarily for “a growing middle class minority,” while for poor Blacks, Johnson said, “the walls are rising and the gulf is widening.”