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

by Ibram X. Kendi

activists desegregating southern businesses that low-income Blacks could hardly afford did not seem like racial progress to Du Bois, who refused to measure racial progress by the gains of Black elites. Du Bois had been waiting for a political-economic program to arise. He had been waiting for something like scholar Michael Harrington’s shocking anti-poverty best seller in 1962, The Other America. “A wall of prejudice is erected to keep the Negroes out of advancement,” Harrington wrote. “The more education a Negro has, the more economic discrimination he faces.” Harrington used statistics to show that uplift suasion did not work. Moreover, he pointed out that “the laws against color can be removed, but that will leave the poverty that is the historic and institutionalized consequence of color.” By the time Harrington tossed a war on poverty onto the Democrats’ agenda, Du Bois had left the country.