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

by Ibram X. Kendi

On March 12, 1956, nineteen US senators and seventy-seven House representatives signed a southern manifesto opposing the Brown v. Board of Education decision for planting “hatred and suspicion where there has been heretofore friendship and understanding.”

Southern schools ensured that their textbooks gave students “bedtime” stories, as historian C. Vann Woodward called them, that read like Gone with the Wind.

But the civil rights movement kept coming. W. E. B. Du Bois was stunned watching the unfolding Montgomery Bus Boycott during the 1956 election year.

Any serious history student of antiracist activism knew that Black women were regularly driving forces.

Du Bois was stunned by the twenty-seven-year-old figurehead of the boycott.

A Baptist preacher as a radic...

see a preacher like Martin Lut...

King had read Du Bois’s books, and he later characterized him as “an intellectual giant” who saw through the “poisonous fog of lies that...

“Slavery was a cruel and barbaric system that annihilated the negro as a person,” Frazier said in the preface to the 1962 edition.

At the time, Black critics were soundly blitzing King’s philosophy of nonviolence, but some were also taking the civil rights movement figurehead to task on some of his lingering assimilationist ideas.

“Why did God make Jesus white, when the majority of peoples in the world are non-white?” Jesus “would have been no more significant if His skin had been black,” King responded. “He is no less significant because his skin was white.” The nation’s most famous Black preacher and activist prayed to a White Jesus? A “disturbed” reader ripped off a letter to Ebony.

I don’t believe Jesus was white,” the reader stated. “What is the basis for your assumption that he was?” With only a basis in racist ideas, King did not respond.

Harper Lee did not expect the story of a young girl coming to terms with racism in the South to become an instant and perennial best seller, or to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961.

“That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” The mockingbird is a metaphor for African Americans.

George Wallace did not disappoint, showing off his new public ideology. “It is very appropriate that from this Cradle of the Confederacy, this very Heart of the Great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generations of forebears before us done, time and again down through history,

He was sounding one of the two timeworn American freedom drums: not the one calling for freedom from oppression, but the one demanding freedom to oppress.

Angela had been four years old when her parents, Sallye and B. Frank Davis, had desegregated that neighborhood in 1948.

White families began moving out as Black families moved in. Some stayed and violently resisted. Because of White resisters’ bombing of Black homes, the neighborhood was often called “Dynamite Hill.”

Sallye Davis had been a leader in the Southern Negro Youth Congress, an antiracist Marxist group that organized against economic exploitation and racist policy in the late 1930s and 1940s, drawing the admiration of W. E. B. Du Bois. On Dynamite Hill, Sallye and her husband nurtured Angela on a steady diet of anticapitalist and antiracist ideas.

She grew up detesting the poverty all around her. And she grew up detesting the poverty of the assimilationist ideas all around her, deciding, “very early, that I would never—and I was categorical about this—never harbor or express the desire to be white.”

Davis listened intently again when yet another towering mentor of 1960s youth came to speak at Brandeis.

Davis could not relate to Malcolm X’s religious deprecations of White people.

But she “was fascinated,” she later said, “by his description of the way Black people had internalized the racial inferiority thrust up...

By her junior year, Davis had gone to study in France, only to be thrust tragically back to Dynamite Hill by ...

church bombing on September 15, 1963, as an isolated incident carried out by so...

was this spectacular, violent event, the savage dismembering of four little girls, which has burst out of the daily, sometimes even dull, routine...

On March 26, 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X came to watch the debate over the civil rights bill, meeting for the first and only known time at the US Capitol.

April 12, 1964, Malcolm offered his plan for the ballot instead of the bullet: going before the United Nations to charge the United States with violating the human rights of African Americans.

“Now you tell me how can the plight of everybody on this Earth reach the halls of the United Nations,” Malcolm said, his voice rising, “and you have twenty-two million Afro-Americans whose churches are being bombed, whose little girls are being murdered, whose leaders are being shot down in broad daylight?” And America still had “the audacity or the nerve to stand up and represent himself as the leader of the free world… with the blood of your and mine [sic] mothers and fathers on his hands—with the blood dripping down his jaws like a bloody-jawed wolf.”

The day after the Detroit speech, this Muslim leader boarded a plane and embarked on his...

Malcolm X on this trip saw for the first time “all colors, from blue-eyed blonds to black-skinned Africans,” interacting as equals. The experience changed him. “The true Islam has shown me that a blanket indictment of all white people is as wrong as when whites make blanket indictments against blacks,” he said.

From then on, he took on the racist wolves and devils, no matter their skin color. Though American media outlets reported his change, the narrative of Malcolm X as hating White people endured.

“We don’t think that one form of injustice can be corrected or should be corrected by creating another,” American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) lawyer Thomas E. Harris said.

Harris believed that taking away Whites’ seniority “would be unjust to the white workers” who had been

Not tackling the seniority question (and past racism) would be “akin to asking the Negro to enter the 100-yard dash forty yards behind the starting line,” argued the general counsel for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Carl Rachlin. But that was what the writers of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were largely asking the Negro to do.

And when the Negro lost the dashes and the racial disparities persisted, racist policymakers could blame the supposed slowness of the Negro, not the head starts of accumulated White privilege.

as much as the Civil Rights Act served to erect a dam against Jim Crow policies, it also opened the floodgates for new racist ideas to pour in, including the most racist idea to date: it was an idea that ignored the White head start, presumed that racist policy had been eliminated, presumed that equal opportunity had taken over, and figured that since Black people we...

Black people must be inferior, and equitable policies—like eliminating or reducing White seniority, or instituting affirmative action pol...

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the first extensive civil rights legislation since the Civil Rights Act of 1875.

On February 21, 1965, some of those enemies gunned down Malcolm X at a Harlem rally.

He argued that White people were not born racist, but that “the American political, economic and social atmosphere… automatically nourishes a racist psychology in the white man.”

He encouraged antiracist White people to fight “on the battle lines of where America’s racism really is—and that’s in their own home communities.”

Because these poor brothers and sisters did not want separation or integration, but only “to live in an open, free society where they can walk with their heads up, like men, and women!”

Malcolm X’s unstinting humanism: “I’m for truth, no matter who tells it.

I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I’m a human being first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and wha...

By 1968, both Democrats and Republicans had popularized the call for “law and order.”

It became a motto for defending the Planet of the Whites.

“Law and order” rhetoric was used as a defense for police brutality, and both the rhetoric and the brutality triggered urban rebellions that in tu...

“What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”

James Brown began in August 1968 to lead the chant of millions: “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud,” a smash hit that topped the R&B singles chart for six weeks.