Stamped from the Beginning: Chapter 8: Black Exhibits Summary & Analysis

In 1772, a group of white men from Boston approach a 19-year-old enslaved woman, Phillis Wheatley, demanding to know if she is the true author of the poetry published under her name. Wheatley’s story is unusual. A Wolof girl captured and brought across the Atlantic as a small child, she is purchased at the age of seven by a Boston couple whose own seven-year-old daughter had died nine years earlier. The Wheatleys raised Phillis like their own daughter, providing her with an extensive education. She writes her first English-language poem at 11, and by 12, she can fluently read Latin, Greek, and English literature along with the Bible.

At 15, Wheatley writes a poem entitled “To the University of Cambridge,” in which she expresses her dream to attend Harvard, which at this point still only admits white men. The poem conveys the assimilationist ideas Wheatley has internalized. In 1771, she assembles a volume of poetry, much of which meditates on the intensifying conflict between Britain and colonial America. It is at this point that the men from Boston come to verify if she is the true author of her works. Astonished that the answer is yes, the men give their signatures as proof of the poems’ authenticity.

Kendi writes that Phillis Wheatley is one of many so-called “barbarians” exposed to assimilationist education and training only to be paraded around as evidence of Black people’s capacity for “civilization.” Francis William is born to a free Black man in Jamaica and sent to Cambridge University, where he performs well. Upon returning to Jamaica, he opens a grammar school for the children of enslavers, where he spreads assimilationist ideas and praises colonial governors. The renowned Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, meanwhile, rejects the idea that William is truly intelligent, comparing him to a parrot who has been taught to repeat “a few words plainly.” Hume is an abolitionist, but nonetheless also a staunch segregationist.

In 1763, Benjamin Franklin meets a group of Black students at a school in Philadelphia and is impressed by their capabilities. He observes that it seems possible that some Black people could “adopt our Language or Customs.” However, he insists that this is only a minority and that most Africans are naturally “sullen” and “malicious.” Because it is easy for racists to concede that there might be a few exceptional Black people, pointing to these exceptional few is not a very effective tactic for antiracism. In 1789, the Countess of Huntingdon Selina Hastings sponsors the production of the formerly enslaved Nigerian Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography. Starting in the 1770s, English law begins to shift toward abolition, although slavery remains in place in the colonies.  

In 1773, a University of Pennsylvania professor named Benjamin Rush anonymously publishes a pamphlet that cites Phillis Wheatley as an example of Black “genius” and argues that all the negative traits associated with Black people are produced by slavery. The truth, of course, is that the negative traits associated with Black people are products of racist thinking alone. Nonetheless, Rush’s anti-slavery pamphlet helps trigger a powerful upswing in abolitionism; in 1774, the first recorded white antislavery society, the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, is founded.

The publication of Wheatley’s poems in 1773 is a massive event in London, and when she arrives in England she is treated like a “rock star.” At this point she is still in enslaved; however, after the Boston Tea Party of December 1773 stokes political tensions, British people decry the hypocrisy of Wheatley’s enslavement and she is granted freedom. When Voltaire reads Wheatley’s work, he admits that it seems Black people are capable of writing poetry. None of this, however, has any effect on proslavery segregationists, because “as long as there [is] slavery, there [will] be racist ideas justifying it.”

In 1773, Thomas Jefferson is caught up in the political tumult of the escalating tensions with Britain. American enslavers at the time are wary of the force of British abolitionism and simultaneously excited by the prospect of making money from non-British markets. In 1774, Jefferson and other Virginia rebels publish a “freedom manifesto,” A Summary View of the Rights of British America, that blames England for slavery and the slave trade. However, some critics point out the hypocrisy in such a tract being written by enslavers.

At the same time, the Jamaica-based enslaver Edward Long writes a book entitled History of Jamaica that lends further weight to the polygenesis theory. Long claims that Black people more closely resemble monkeys than white people and argues that Francis William was a white man in “black skin,” complete with fervent anti-Black beliefs. A new wave of debate about polygenesis ensues. Immanuel Kant—one of the most influential philosophers in history—argues against polygenesis, yet simultaneously claims that Europeans are the original and best human group. Benjamin Franklin, meanwhile, argues that by restricting American autonomy through colonial policy, England is turning “American whites black.” The writer Samuel Johnson mocks the revolutionary American elite, pointing out that the only true discussion of freedom emerging from America comes from Black voices.