Max Disher / Matthew Fisher
Protagonist Max Disher is a Black American in 1931 New York. While he appreciates Harlem’s cultural institutions, he also faces painful discrimination, which becomes particularly evident when he meets a blonde girl who turns him…
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Dr. Junius Crookman
Dr. Crookman is the creator of the “Black-No-More” treatment, which makes Black people look white. He initially researches and creates the treatment—with the help of his business associates Foster and Johnson—in order to remove…
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Rev. Henry Givens
Henry Givens is the leader of the Knights of Nordica, Mrs. Givens’s husband and Helen’s father. He is an ex-evangelist and former member of the Ku Klux Klan, where he siphoned money…
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Helen Givens/The Blonde Girl
Helen Givens is Rev. Givens’s daughter, who ultimately becomes Max’s wife. Helen is introduced as a nameless beautiful blonde girl at the Honky Tonk Club, where she cruelly rejects Max’s advances because he…
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Samuel Buggerie
Samuel Buggerie is a nervous, bald statistician who comes from one of the First Families of Virginia. He believes that the best way to tell “pure” white people from others is to study family trees…
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Get the entire Black No More LitChart as a printable PDF.
Arthur Snobbcraft
Arthur Snobbcraft is the President of the Anglo-Saxon Association. A strong believer in white supremacy and racial purity, Snobbcraft teams up with Max and the Knights of Nordica despite the fact that he looks down…
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Bunny Brown
Bunny Brown is Max’s best friend. After Max turns white from the “Black-No-More” treatment, Max sponsors Bunny’s own treatment, allowing Bunny to become white and follow Max to Atlanta. There, Bunny becomes Max’s assistant…
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Santop Licorice
Santop Licorice is the founder and leader of the Back-to-Africa Society. The book critiques him as a hypocrite, because he both praises racial solidarity but he also dislikes other Black leaders like Beard. Licorice…
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Shakespeare Agamemnon Beard/Karl von Beerde
Beard is the founder of the National Social Equality League. Though he preaches racial solidarity, the book implies that he secretly admires white people and pities and despises other Black Americans. Beard tries to appeal…
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Mrs. Sisseretta Blandish/Sari Blandine
Mrs. Blandish is a businesswoman and Max’s landlady at the beginning of the novel. She owns a hair salon in Harlem, New York, which helps Black people straighten and relax their hair to make…
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Hank Johnson
Hank Johnson is one of Dr. Crookman’s business partners. Ten years prior to the beginning of the novel, he was in a chain gang and then worked his way up to become one of…
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Alex McPhule
Alex McPhule is a reverend who founds a new kind of Christianity and spreads it in Happy Hill, Mississippi. He claims that God has visited him and is going to send him a Sign on…
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Walter Williams
Walter Williams is one of the leaders whom Dr. Beard gathers to condemn the “Black-No-More” treatment. Williams is a heavy-set white man (though Williams claims he is proud to be part of Black society because…
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Matthew Fisher Jr.
Matthew Fisher Jr. is Max and Helen’s son. His birth prompts Max to reveal to Helen that he is actually Black, as Matthew Jr. has darker skin. After Helen learns of her own Black…
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Minor Characters
Joseph Bonds
Joseph Bonds is the leader of the Negro Data League. He convinces others of the necessity to conduct studies on socioeconomic conditions so that they will donate to the League, but his data has little practical effect. Eventually Bonds receives the “Black-No-More” treatment and works for Gorman Gay.
Charles “Chuck” Foster
Chuck Foster is one of Dr. Crookman’s business partners. He is a Black American real estate agent in New York who helps fund Crookman’s work and also helps him find new buildings to turn into sanitariums. Foster is more cautious than Dr. Crookman’s other business partner, Hank Johnson.
Walter Brybe
Brybe is the U.S. Attorney General at the beginning of the novel. Gorman Gay has heavy influence over him, and so when Brybe receives a letter asking him to investigate and stop the “Black-No-More” treatment, Gay convinces Brybe to ignore the letter.
Frazier
Frazier is a pilot whom Snobbcraft and Buggerie hire to take them out of the country when mobs set after them. However, the plane runs out of gas and Frazier is unable to land safely. The plane crashes into a ditch in Mississippi, and Frazier is killed.
Blickdoff
Blickdoff and Hortzenboff are the owners of a factory in Paradise, South Carolina, where many Knights of Nordica work. Matthew extorts them in exchange for quelling the unionization efforts there.
Hortzenboff
Hortzenboff and Blickdoff are the owners of a factory in Paradise, South Carolina, where many Knights of Nordica work. Matthew extorts them in exchange for quelling the unionization efforts there.
Rufus Kretin
Rufus Kretin is the Democratic Senator from Georgia. Buggerie’s research reveals that he has Black ancestry, and as a result, a mob lynches him on Election Day.
Harold Goosie
Harold Goosie is the president of the United States at the beginning of the novel. He is a Republican who ends up winning reelection after Givens and Snobbcraft flee the country.
Gorman Gay
Gorman Gay is the National Chairman of the Republican National Committee. Hank Johnson bribes Gay to keep the Republicans sympathetic to “Black-No-More.”
Sybil Smith
Sybil Smith is a reporter from The Scimitar to whom Max sells his story after receiving the “Black-No-More” treatment.
Gump
Gump is the Vice President at the beginning of the novel who wins reelection along with President Harold Goosie.
Mrs. Givens
Mrs. Givens is Rev. Henry Givens’s wife and Helen’s mother.
