Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Stamped from the Beginning, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Discrimination, Racist Ideas, and Ignorance
Segregationists and Assimilationists vs. Antiracists
Media, Institutions, and the Transmission of Knowledge
The Invention of Blackness and Whiteness
The Illogic of Racism
Summary
Analysis
In 1890, a new colonization bill proposes paying for Black Americans to move to Africa. Proponents of colonization argue that God’s purpose for slavery was to civilize Black people so that they could return and “redeem Africa.” Walter Vaughan, a Nebraska Democrat who was born into a family of Alabama enslavers, argues that the federal government should provide a pension to the formerly enslaved, which would help stimulate the struggling Southern economy. In 1891 a formerly enslaved woman named Callie House founds the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association partly inspired by Vaughan’s pamphlet. This is the beginning of the reparations movement, which attracts little interest from the Black elite. House condemns this lack of support, arguing that “The most learned negroes” actually seem to be “fighting against the welfare of their race.”
Callie House is one of the many Black leaders depicted in the book who refuses to capitulate to racist, assimilationist, elitist ideas, even when these ideas are the norm of the time. Indeed, House’s visionary plan for economic justice becomes the basis for the reparations movement. Kendi points out that her condemnation of the Black elite highlights a difficult truth about the fight for racial justice: while the racist ideas and actions of white people are always the original and biggest obstacle to justice, sometimes Black people have stood in the way through embracing racist ideas, too.
Themes
In 1890, Du Bois graduates from Harvard and gives another graduation speech in which he praises Jefferson Davis and expresses racist ideas about the superiority of Europeans to Africans, whom he characterizes as weak and submissive. In the fall, Du Bois begins his Ph.D. in history at Harvard. With study abroad funding from former president Rutherford B. Hayes, Du Bois travels to the University of Berlin, at this point “the most distinguished university in the European world.”
Du Bois’s assimilationist message about how European culture is superior to African culture shows how racist thinking can distort a person’s self-perception. Du Bois’s education and broader society have led him to believe that Blackness is inferior despite being Black himself.
Themes
Meanwhile, Massachusetts congressman Henry Cabot Lodge propose a bill allowing voters to be granted election supervision if they request it from the federal government. Southern segregationists call this anti-discrimination bill “hateful.” Many Southern states introduce literacy tests and other methods to prevent Black people voting. Ultimately, Lodge’s bill does not pass anyway. Du Bois is not particularly concerned by voter suppression, arguing, “When you have the right sort of Black voters, you will need no election laws.” At this point, a wave of segregationist laws are passed in the South, dividing almost every aspect of life along the color line and creating a society that is “separate but (un)equal.”
Kendi shows how the notion that protecting people’s voting rights is “hateful” is absurd but doesn’t stop people from making the argument. This is a powerful example of how racist ideas work in spite of not making sense, and how they even carry part of their power through being nonsensical. By claiming that something is “hateful,” racists blatantly project their own actions onto those trying to implement antiracist policies. Kendi suggests that, in doing so, such people demonstrate that they do not care about the truth, only their own beliefs.
Themes
Black people mount protests to this segregation movement; white people respond with a massive escalation in lynching, all while blaming the increase in lynching on a supposedly growing rate of Black crime. Both Du Bois and the elderly Frederick Douglass accept this false excuse, but journalist and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells does not. In 1892, Wells publishes a pamphlet entitled Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, and the following year, she travels to England for an “anti-lynching tour.” In 1896, the National Association of Colored Women is founded, with the motto “Lifting as We Climb.”
Throughout the book, Kendi reminds the reader that while most political figures in American history harbored racist views (either assimilationist or segregationist), there have always been exceptions. People like Ida B. Wells are ahead of their time and singular in their commitment to true antiracist views.
Themes
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Du Bois returns from Germany in 1894 after his request for funding extension is denied. In 1895, he becomes the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard, which invites racist mockery from many, including future president Franklin Delano Roosevelt (at this point a Harvard freshman). Du Bois’s time in Germany gave him experience of relating to white people as equals. His first professorial job is at a Black college in Ohio, Wilberforce. At this point Du Bois still believes in the uplift suasion principle that “racism could be persuaded and educated away.”
Spending time in Europe has a profound impact on Du Bois’s life—as it does for many 20th-century intellectuals, such as Angela Davis and James Baldwin. That he experiences relating to white people as equals in Germany is not to say that anti-Black racism does not exist in Germany at the time; instead, Du Bois’s time in Germany gives him an experience of a social world outside the distinct codes of American racism.
Themes
Booker T. Washington is an influential educator who takes over as the nation’s most prominent Black leader following Douglass’s death in 1895. He encourages Black people to accept a lower status in life in exchange for tolerance from white people in his famous “Atlanta Compromise” speech. Du Bois sends Washington a telegram expressing his admiration for the speech. In 1896, the Supreme Court rules 7-1 in favor of upholding segregation in Plessy vs. Ferguson. Even the sole dissenting opinion insisted that white supremacy will and should always exist in America. At this point, the segregationist policies that already exist throughout the South are confirmed to be legal.
This passage highlights the problems of “compromises” with racist ideas and policies. Individuals like Washington want Black people to be able to advance yet are willing to strike bargains with racists. Although this might seem reasonable and strategic at first glance, Kendi underscores throughout his book that racists have no willingness or incentive to make compromises.
Themes
