Stamped from the Beginning

Stamped from the Beginning

by

Ibram X. Kendi

Teachers and parents! Our Teacher Edition on Stamped from the Beginning makes teaching easy.

Stamped from the Beginning Characters

Ibram X. Kendi

Ibram X. Kendi is the author of Stamped from the Beginning. At the time Kendi is writing, he is working as a professor of Africana Studies, having earned his PhD from Temple University’s historic… read analysis of Ibram X. Kendi

Cotton Mather

One of the five central figures that Kendi bases the book around, Cotton Mather was a Puritan minister who was born in New England in 1663. Mather was a descendant of the illustrious Cotton and… read analysis of Cotton Mather

Thomas Jefferson

Another of the five central figures featured in the book, Jefferson was born in Virginia to a wealthy slaveholding father named Peter. Jefferson inherited the plantation as a teenager when Peter died and went… read analysis of Thomas Jefferson

William Lloyd Garrison

Another of the five figures featured in the book, Garrison was a white anti-slavery activist and editor of the influential abolitionist paper The Liberator. Born in 1805, Garrison worked for a newspaper editor as… read analysis of William Lloyd Garrison

W. E. B. Du Bois

Du Bois is the fourth figure that Kendi focuses on in the book, with arguably the most rich and complicated career. Born in Great Barrington, a small town in Massachusetts in 1868, Du Bois was… read analysis of W. E. B. Du Bois
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Angela Davis

Angela Davis is the last of the five figures Kendi focuses on and the only one to have embraced antiracism from the beginning of her life. A talented student from Birmingham, Alabama, Davis attended Brandeis… read analysis of Angela Davis

Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president of the United States, remembered by many as the “Great Emancipator” due to his issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation and Fourteenth Amendment, which banned slavery in the U.S. Originally… read analysis of Abraham Lincoln

Phillis Wheatley

A Wolof girl who was captured and enslaved as a young child, Phillis Wheatley was adopted by a Boston couple who came to treat her like their own daughter. Unlike most enslaved people, she received… read analysis of Phillis Wheatley

Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass was an abolitionist and writer who was enslaved from birth but self-emancipated and went on to write the highly influential Interesting Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. Garrison… read analysis of Frederick Douglass

Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston was a Black author and anthropologist who was also an anti-assimitationalist. Consistently and defiantly antiracist, Hurston criticized other Black leaders—such as Du Bois—for their elitist tendencies and tendency to think… read analysis of Zora Neale Hurston

Malcolm X

Malcom X was a Black radical leader who became famous during the Civil Rights movement. Malcolm was a Muslim after joining the Nation of Islam while incarcerated. He initially embraced ideas about white people being… read analysis of Malcolm X

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Black Baptist preacher who came to be viewed as the leader of the Civil Rights movement. Early in his activist career King emphasized nonviolence and Christian principles of passivity… read analysis of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Ronald Reagan

Ronald Reagan was an actor-turned-politician who served as Governor of California from 1967 to 1975, during which time he desperately tried to have Angela Davis removed from her post as an assistant professor at UCLA… read analysis of Ronald Reagan

Bartholomé de Las Casas

Bartholomé de Las Casas was the son of a Spanish merchant and the first priest to be ordained in the Americas. He traveled to Hispaniola in 1502 along with the first enslaved Africans to be… read analysis of Bartholomé de Las Casas

Al-Hasan Ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fasi/Leo Africanus

Al-Hasann Ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fasi was a highly educated Moroccan who was captured, enslaved, and presented as a gift to Pope Leo X, who freed him and christened him Johannes Leo, although he came… read analysis of Al-Hasan Ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fasi/Leo Africanus

Sally Hemings

Sally Hemings was one of the dozens of enslaved people held in captivity on Thomas Jefferson’s plantation, Monticello. When Hemings was 14, Jefferson began raping her; she had several children by him. At 16… read analysis of Sally Hemings

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Beecher Stowe was a white author from Maine who was involved in both the early women’s rights movement and the abolitionist movement. Her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) was widely read and praised by… read analysis of Harriet Beecher Stowe

Ulysses S. Grant

Grant was a Republican and Civil War hero who was elected president in 1868. Grant introduced rights legislation for Black people during the Reconstruction era, notably the Fifteenth Amendment which granted Black men the right… read analysis of Ulysses S. Grant

Barack Obama

Barack Obama was the 44th president—and first Black president—of the United States. Obama’s election in 2008 was seen as a victory over racism by individuals across the political spectrum. However, Kendi points out that his… read analysis of Barack Obama

John F. Kennedy

The 35th U.S. President, from 1961 until his assassination in 1963. In his bid for the presidency he generally tries to avoid the topic of civil rights as he fears that it might hurt his… read analysis of John F. Kennedy

Lyndon Johnson

The 36th U.S. President. Johnson was originally an anti-civil-rights politician, who was made John F. Kennedy's Vice Presidential candidate precisely for that reason: Kennedy felt that having such a running mate would protect him from… read analysis of Lyndon Johnson
Minor Characters
Jefferson Davis
Jefferson Davis was a 19th-century Mississippi senator who went on to become president of the Confederacy. In a 1860 speech he claimed that the “inequality of white and black races” in America was “stamped from the beginning.”
Kimberlé Crenshaw
Crenshaw was a legal scholar who developed the concept of intersectionality.
Richard Mather
Richard Mather was a Puritan minister and colonial settler who arrived on American shores in 1635. He was one of the founders of Harvard College and Cotton Mather’s grandfather.
John Cotton
John Cotton was another Puritan minister and Cotton Mather’s other grandfather. He wrote the first constitution of New England, which legalized the purchase of enslaved people during war.
Ibn Battuta
Ibn Battuta was a 14th-century Moroccan scholar and traveler who traveled to the area now known as Mali and wrote about his experiences.
Ibn Khaldun
Ibn Khaldun was another 14th-century Arab scholar who believed in the climate theory of Black inferiority.
Ham
In the Old Testament, Ham is the cursed son of Noah. Throughout history, certain scholars chose to argue that Black people were the descendants of Ham. This is known as the curse theory of Black inferiority.
Prince Henry
Prince Henry was a 15th-century Portuguese royal who oversaw colonization and slave trading missions in West Africa.
Gomes Earnes de Zurara
Gomes Earnes de Zurara was a Portuguese writer who documented Prince Henry’s life and work in The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, which is arguably the first surviving written record of anti-Black racist ideas.
Queen Isabel of Spain
Queen Isabel was Prince Henry’s great-niece and the sponsor of Christopher Columbus’ journey to Asia, which resulted in him accidentally landing in the Americas.
Christopher Columbus
Christopher Columbus was an Italian explorer and colonizer whose (accidental) encounter with the Americas launched the European colonization of the North and South American continents.
Pope Leo X
Pope Leo X freed and christened Leo Africanus after being presented him as a gift.
George Best
George Best was an English travel writer who questioned the climate theory of Black inferiority.
William Perkins
William Perkins was a Cambridge theologian who, in his 1590 essay Ordering a Familie, characterizes the relationship between masters and slaves as a “loving family relationship.”
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an early modern playwright, arguably the most famous writer in the world, who explored themes of race and colonization in his plays (notably Othello and The Tempest).
Ben Jonson
Ben Jonson was an English playwright who wrote The Masque of Blackness.
Queen Anne
Queen Anne was an English queen who performed in blackface at the premiere of Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness.
King James
King James was an English king who expanded the British colonial territories in North America.
Pocahontas
Pocahontas was an indigenous woman who was captured by British colonists and taken to England, where she was toured as an example of a “civilized savage.”
John Pory
John Pory was an English colonist who lived in Jamestown and was the English translator of Leo AfricanusGeographical Histories of Africa.
Elizabeth Key
Elizabeth Key was an enslaved biracial woman who sued for her freedom after it was not granted as promised by her white legislator father in 1655.
Richard Ligon
Richard Ligon was the English author of A True and Exact Historie of the Island of Barbadoes (1657). In it, he argued that Black people are naturally “docile” and that the enslaved should be allowed to convert to Christianity.
Robert Boyle
Robert Boyle was an English scientist who developed the idea that black skin is a corruption of the normal default of white skin.
Increase Mather
Increase Mather was Cotton Mather’s father.
Maria Cotton
Maria Cotton was Cotton Mather’s mother.
Richard Baxter
Richard Baxter was a British minister who argued that slavery could be positive and benevolent as long as the enslaved were permitted to convert to Christianity.
John Locke
John Locke was a famous English philosopher and physician who was an advocate of polygenesis, arguing that West Africans are descended from both humans and apes.
Metacomet/King Philip
Metacomet—known as King Philip in English—was sachem, or leader, of the Wampanoag people.
Aphra Behn
Aphra Behn was an English author and playwright who wrote Oronooko: or, the Royal Slave (1688), the first novel that repeatedly characterizes its characters as white or Black.
James Blair
James Blair was an enslaver, commissary of Virginia, and the founder of the College of William & Mary.
John Saffin
John Saffin was a New England businessman and judge who in 1700 refused to free a Black indentured servant, Adam.
Adam
Adam was an servant indentured to John Saffin.
Samuel Sewall
Samuel Sewall was a Boston judged who denounced John Saffin’s refusal to free his black indentured servant Adam and slavery in general, although he advocated for Black people to be removed from New England and taken back to Africa.
Onesimus
Onesimus was an enslaved man whom Cotton Mather held in captivity after being given him as a “gift.”
Zabadiel Boylston
Boylston was a Boston doctor who successfully inoculated his young son against smallpox alongside two enslaved people based on African medicinal techniques.
Peter Jefferson
Peter Jefferson was Thomas Jefferson’s father and the owner of a large tobacco plantation in Virginia, Shadwell.
Voltaire
Voltaire was a French Enlightenment philosopher who condemned slavery yet advocated for polygenesis and a natural hierarchy of races.
John Woolman
John Woolman was a New Jersey Quaker who wrote the famous abolitionist tract Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes (1746). Woolman’s largely antiracist argument, Kendi notes, was ahead of its time.
Samuel Howell
Samuel Howell was a self-emancipated biracial man whose legal case Jefferson took soon after graduating law school.
Francis William
Francis William was a free Black Jamaican man who was sent to the University of Cambridge in order to prove Black people’s capacity for “civilization.” After returning to Jamaica, he opened a school and enthusiastically disseminated assimilationist ideas.
David Hume
David Hume was a renowned Scottish philosopher who Kendi points out was both a staunch racist and an abolitionist.
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers.
Selina Hastings
Selina Hastings was an Englishwoman (whose title was the Countess of Huntingdon) who sponsored the production of Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography.
Olaudah Equiano
Born in what is currently southern Nigeria, Equiano was captured and enslaved as a child before purchasing his freedom and writing The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789).
Edward Long
Edward Long was an enslaver living in Jamaica who in The History of Jamaica supports the polygenesis theory.
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher and one of the most influential thinkers in Western history. He disputed polygenesis, but not European supremacy.
Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson was an English writer who mocked the American Revolutionary elite for their hypocrisy in championing freedom while at the same time enslaving people.
Adam Smith
Adam Smith was a highly influential Scottish economist who wrote The Wealth of Nations (1776).
George Washington
George Washington was one of the Founding Fathers, a celebrated general in the Revolutionary War, and the first U.S. president. He delayed addressing the question of abolition because he argued it is not the right time, falsely claiming that anti-Black “prejudice” was waning on its own.
Martha Jefferson
Martha Jefferson was Thomas Jefferson’s wife. She died in 1782.
Samuel Stanhope Smith
Samuel Stanhope Smith was a Presbyterian minister who advocated for the climate theory of Black inferiority.
James Wilson
James Wilson was a Supreme Court Justice who, before being nominated to the Court, proposed that enslaved people should legally count as three-fifths of a person.
Elbridge Gerry
Elbridge Gerry was an American politician and abolitionist.
Polly Jefferson
Polly Jefferson was Thomas and Martha Jefferson’s daughter.
Benjamin Banneker
Banneker was a free Black men who wrote a letter to Jefferson in 1791 encouraging him to lend support to Black people against the tide of anti-Black racism.
Benjamin Rush
Benjamin Rush was a Philadelphia physician who falsely informed Black people that they were immune from yellow fever, which led to thousands of avoidable deaths.
Eli Whitney
Eli Whitney was the inventor of the cotton gin.
John Adams
John Adams was another Founding Father and the second president of the United States.
Henry Moss
Henry Moss was a Black man with a skin condition called vitiligo, wherein skin loses its pigment. Benjamin Rush believed that Moss represented a miraculous hope for Black people’s ability to physically assimilate into whiteness.
Henri Gregoire
Henri Gregoire was a French abolitionist scientist and author of An Enquiry Concerning the Intellectual and Moral Faculties, and Literature of Negroes.
Sarah Baartman
Sarah Baartman was a Khoi woman who was captured and cruelly exhibited in France.
Gabriel Prosser
Gabriel Prosser was an enslaved rebel who organized a rebellion in Virginia in 1800 with Nancy Prosser.
Nancy Prosser
Nancy Prosser was the co-organizer, with Gabriel Prosser, of the 1800 rebellion.
Denmark Vesey
Denmark Vesey was an enslaved person who attempted to stage a Haitian Revolution-style coup due to take place on July 14,1822. He recruited a large number of rebels for his “army” before being betrayed by fellow slave Peter Prioleau.
Peter Prioleau
Peter Prioleau was an enslaved man who betrayed Vesey and gained freedom as a reward. He went on to become an enslaver himself.
Samuel Cornish
Samuel Cornish was a Black preacher and coeditor of the nation’s first Black newspaper, Freedom’s Journal.
John Russwurm
John Russwurm was the third Black person to graduate from an American college and coeditor of Freedom’s Journal.
Robert E. Lee
Robert E. Lee was Commander of the Confederate army during the Civil War.
Benjamin Lundy
Benjamin Lundy was the editor of the abolitionist journal Genius of Universal Emancipation.
David Walker
David Walker was a Black abolitionist and author of the visionary antiracist, antislavery pamphlet, Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World.
Maria Stewart
Maria Stewart was an early Black feminist and abolitionist.
P. T. Barnum
P. T. Barnum was a famous 19th-century showman.
Nat Turner
Nat Turner was an enslaved man who staged a rebellion after receiving instructions via a vision from God. Turner successfully killed at least 57 people during the rebellion, starting with his master’s family.
Thomas Roderick Dew
Dew was a pro-slavery professor at the College of William & Mary who advocated against colonization.
John C. Calhoun
Calhoun was a fervently pro-slavery South Carolina senator who twice served as vice president of the United States.
Edward Jarvis
Jarvis was a Harvard-educated psychiatrist who developed racist research that argued that slavery was psychologically beneficial to Black people.
Josiah C. Nott
Nott was a Southern scientist and enslaver who argued that biracial women were less fertile than those of “purely” African or European descent.
George R. Gliddon
Gliddon was a pro-slavery Egyptologist.
Samuel A. Cartwright
Cartwright was a doctor and former student of Benjamin Rush who claimed that enslaved people suffer from a disease called “dysesthesia,” cured only by submitting to the authority of white people.
J. Marion Sims
Sims was an Alabama doctor who conducted brutal medical experiments on dozens of enslaved women without providing them with anesthesia.
James K. Polk
Polk was the 11th president of the United States.
Sojourner Truth
Sojourner Truth was an early Black feminist and formerly enslaved woman who gave the famous speech “Ain’t I a Woman?” in Ohio in 1851.
Martin R. Delany
Delany was a Black writer and doctor often said to be the first Black nationalist.
Franklin Pierce
Pierce was a Northern Democrat and Mexican-American War general who was opposed to abolition. He served as the 14th president of the United States.
Herman Melville
Melville was a famous American writer who satirized racist pseudoscience (and particularly polygenesis) in his short story “The ‘Gees.’”
James Buchanan
Buchanan was a Democrat and the 15th president of the United States.
Dred Scott
Dred Scott was an enslaved Black man who unsuccessfully sued for his freedom in a case that was taken to the Supreme Court. The 1857 ruling, Dred Scott v. Sanford, barred Black people from citizenship.
Roger B. Taney
Taney was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court during the Dred Scott v. Sandford case. He was an enslaver who freed his own captives but continued to champion the property rights of enslavers.
Stephen Douglas
Stephen Douglas was a Democratic senator and prominent critic of Abraham Lincoln.
Hilton Rowan Helper
Helper was a North Carolina critic who wrote The Impending Crisis of the South, a racist argument against slavery that advocates for abolition on the basis of white labor rights.
John Brown
Brown was a radical white abolitionist who argued in favor of armed insurrection against slavery. He was hanged in 1859.
Charles Darwin
Darwin was an English biologist who wrote The Origin of Species, pioneering the theory of evolution.
Francis Galton
Galton was another English scientist who developed the principle of “nature v. nurture.” He was Darwin’s cousin.
Henry Villard
Villard was a German-American journalist and friend of Garrison’s son.
Wendell Phillips
Phillips was an abolitionist and critic of Lincoln.
Garrison Frazier
Frazier was the formerly enslaved editor of The Liberator.
John Wilkes Booth
John Wilkes Booth was the proslavery Confederate assassin who murdered Abraham Lincoln at the theater.
Andrew Johnson
Andrew Johnson was the 17th president of the United States. He took over after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. A Democrat, he immediately introduced conciliatory measures with the former Confederacy after assuming the presidency.
Thaddeus Stevens
Stevens was a “Radical Republican” member of the House of Representatives from Pennsylvania.
Horace Greeley
Greeley was the pro-segregation Democratic candidate for president in the 1872 election.
Rutherford B. Hayes
Rutherford B. Hayes was the Republican winner of the tightly contested 1876 presidential election. With such a slim margin of victory, Hayes chose to make concessions to Democrats that amounted to the end of Reconstruction.
Mary Silvina Burghardt
Mary Silvina Burghardt was W. E. B. Du Bois’s mother.
George Washington Williams
Williams was a Black historian and writer of History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880.
Otto von Bismarck
Otto von Bismarck was an aristocratic German leader who oversaw the unification of Germany in the late 19th century before serving as the first German chancellor.
Walter Vaughan
Vaughan was a Nebraska Democrat who proposed giving a pension to the formerly enslaved.
Callie House
House was a formerly enslaved woman and founder of the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty, and Pension Association. House’s work can be seen as originating the reparations movement. She criticized the Black elite’s lack of solidarity with poor Black people.
Henry Cabot Lodge
Henry Cabot Lodge was a Massachusetts congressman who proposed legislation to discourage racist voter intimidation that did not pass.
Ida B. Wells
Ida B. Wells was a Black journalist and anti-lynching activist who was singular in her commitment to antiracist thinking.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
The 32nd president of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt was a Democrat who oversaw the New Deal.
Booker T. Washington
Booker T. Washington was a formerly enslaved educator, orator, and head of the Tuskegee Institute who made the famous “Atlanta Compromise” speech of 1895. He was the author of the memoir Up From Slavery (1901).
Havelock Ellis
Havelock Ellis was a British sexologist who was the first person to use the term “homosexual.”
Frederick Hoffman
Frederick Hoffman was an insurance statistician and author of Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, which argued that Black people were heading toward “gradual extinction.”
William Archibald Dunning
Dunning was a Columbia University professor and the developer of the Dunning School of Reconstruction, a group of historians that blamed Reconstruction’s failure on Black people.
Thomas Dixon Jr.
Thomas Dixon Jr. was the most influential member of the Dunning School.
William Hannibal Thomas
William Hannibal Thomas was a Black writer and legislator who wrote The American Negro: What He Was, What He Is, and What He May Become, a book so filled with racist ideas that it led Black people to label him “Judas.”
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt was the 26th president of the United States.
Franz Boas
Boas was a German Jewish scholar known as the father of anthropology.
Jack Johnson
Jack Johnson was a Black boxer who made history by being the first Black person to make it to the heavyweight championships final. However, the match was ultimately cancelled after Johnson was arrested on fabricated charges and fled the country.
Jim Jeffries
Jim Jeffries was an American boxer who was the World Heavyweight Champion.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Edgar Rice Burroughs was the American author of Tarzan (1912).
Oswald Garrison Villard
Villard was an American journalist and William Lloyd Garrison’s grandson; considered the “darling of White liberal America.”
Mary White Ovington
Ovington was a white woman journalist, suffragist, and cofounder of the NAACP who expressed assimilationist ideas.
Nannie H. Burroughs
Burroughs was a Black educator and writer who contributed to Du Bois’ special issue of The Crisis on the question of women’s suffrage.
Woodrow Wilson
Wilson was a segregationist Democrat elected president in 1912.
Marcus Garvey
Garvey was a Jamaican Black nationalist who clashed with Du Bois in the early 20th century. Garvey was critical of what he saw as the elitism, colorism, and assimilationism of the NAACP and started his own Universal Negro Improvement Association as an alternative.
Adolf Hitler
Hitler was the leader of the Nazi party and Chancellor of Germany from 1934-1945.
Lewis Terman
Terman was a Stanford psychologist and eugenicist who invented the IQ test.
Karl Marx
Marx was a German theorist who developed the political philosophy of communism in the 19th century.
Warren G. Harding
Harding was the 29th president of the United States.
Alaine Locke
Locke was a writer and Howard University professor famous for his book The New Negro.
Wallace Thurman
Thurman was a Black novelist and an anti-assimilationist Harlem Renaissance artists.
Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes was a Harlem Renaissance poet and an anti-assimilationist Harlem Renaissance artists.
Carl Van Vechten
Carl Van Vechten was a white patron of the Harlem Renaissance and author of the highly controversial novel N_____ Heaven.
Ruth Benedict
An anthropologist who had been a student of Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict invented the term “racism.”
E. Franklin Frazier
Frazier was a Black sociologist and author of The Negro Family in the United States, which pathologized Black families and argued for an assimilationist solution.
Mammy
Mammy was a stereotypical Black character from the racist 1939 film Gone with the Wind.
Richard Wright
Wright was the author of the hugely influential books Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945).
Bigger Thomas
Bigger Thomas was the tormented main character in Richard Wright’s book Native Son.
James Baldwin
James Baldwin was an enormously influential Black writer of the 20th century. He critiqued both Harriet Beecher Stowe and Richard Wright in his essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel.”
Kwame Nkrumah
Kwame Nkrumah was a Ghanaian anticolonial revolutionary and the first Prime Minister and President of independent Ghana.
Jomo Kenyatta
Jomo Kenyatta was a Kenyan anticolonial activist and the first indigenous head of government of Kenya, serving as President and then Prime Minister from 1963-1978.
Ashley Montagu
Ashley Montagu was a student of Franz Boas and the author of Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race (1942).
Harry Truman
Truman was the 33rd president of the United States. He introduced the Truman Doctrine, which emphasized the U.S.’ role in protecting the freedoms of people around the world.
William Patterson
Patterson was a Black communist leader who in 1951 delivered a petition (signed by Du Bois and other leaders) to the U.N. entitled We Charge Genocide.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Truman’s successor as president, Eisenhower was in power during the early civil rights movement. Facing shame from the international community, Eisenhower enforced desegregation using the U.S. military.
Emmet Till
Emmet Till was a 14-year-old Black boy brutally murdered by a lynch mob in Mississippi during the era of “massive resistance” to desegregation.
Elijah Muhammad
Elijah Muhammad was the leader of the Nation of Islam, a Black separatist Muslim group of which Malcolm X was a member.
George Wallace
George Wallace was a vocally segregationist Alabama Governor.
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse was a German Marxist philosopher who taught Angela Davis.
Barry Goldwater
Barry Goldwater was an ultra-conservative Arizona senator who ran for president on the Republican ticket in 1964.
Alex Haley
Alex Haley was a Black author who wrote the 1976 book Roots: The Saga of an American Family cowrote Malcolm X’s Autobiography.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Moynihan was a white politician who authored the infamous Moynihan Report, which pathologized the matriarchal structure of Black families in the U.S.
Stokely Carmichael
Carmichael was a Trinidadian American activist who graduated from Howard University, served as chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, and is thought to be the first person to use (or at least popularize) the phrase Black Power. He later changed his name to Kwame Ture.
Huey P. Newton
Newton was a young activist who cofounded the Black Panther Party for Self Defense with Bobby Seale. He was murdered in 1989.
Bobby Seale
Seale was the cofounder of the Black Panther Party with Huey Newton.
Charles Hamilton
Hamilton was the coauthor of the book Black Power with Stokely Carmichael.
Eldridge Cleaver
Cleaver was a Black Power activist, husband of Kathleen Cleaver, and author of the memoir Soul on Ice.
Kathleen Cleaver
Kathleen Cleaver was a Black Power activist and the first woman to serve in the Black Panther’s Central Committee.
Richard Nixon
Nixon was the 37th president of the United States. Nixon introduces the “law and order” style of political leadership, ramping up policing and mass incarceration only for his own presidency to end in the Watergate Scandal, a crime for which he is never incarcerated.
James Brown
James Brown as a funk musician whose song “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud” helped popularize Black Power.
Frances Beal
Beal was cofounder of the Black Women’s Liberation Committee, a subcommittee within the SNCC. She advocates for Angela Davis while Davis is on the run and incarcerated.
Charlene Mitchell
Mitchell was the first Black woman to run for president of the United States, on the Communist Party ticket in 1968.
Jonathan Jackson
Jonathan Jackson was an American revolutionary who was killed at 17 while storming the Marin County Courthouse in an attempt to free the Soledad Brothers, including his brother George Jackson.
Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison was a Black novelist considered by some to be the greatest writer in American history.
Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou was a poet, writer, and activist.
George Jackson
George Jackson was a Black author and revolutionary who was one of the Soledad Brothers. He was killed during an attempted escape from prison.
Audre Lorde
Audre Lorde was a Black lesbian feminist poet and activist.
Ntozake Shange
Shange was a Black feminist poet and playwright.
Alice Walker
Alice Walker was a Black feminist writer.
Michelle Wallace
Wallace was a Black feminist writer, critic, and professor. She’s most famous for her 1979 work Black Macho and the Myth of Superwoman.
Bo Derek
Bo Derek was a white actress who became famous for sporting cornrows, which were nicknamed “Bo Braids.”
Kunta Kinte
Kunta Kinte is the main character in Alex Haley’s book Roots, the story of a man (Kinte) who’s kidnapped and enslaved in Gambia and brought to America.
Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter was the 39th president of the United States.
William Julius Wilson
Wilson was a Black sociologist and the author of The Declining Significance of Race.
Harry Blackmun
Blackmun was a white Supreme Court Justice who warned against the perils of “race-blind” approach to policy.
Gus Hall
Gus Hall was the Communist Party’s presidential candidate in 1980.
George H. W. Bush
George H. W. Bush was the 41st president of the United States.
Michael Dukakis
Michael Dukakis was George H. W. Bush’s opponent during the 1989 presidential race. His defeat was in part credited to the fact that he was perceived to be too “soft” on crime.
Molefi Kete Asante
Asante was the founder of Afrocentrism and chair of Temple University’s Black Studies Department.
Rodney King
Rodney King was a Black taxi driver in Los Angeles who was brutally beaten by the LAPD in 1991.
Clarence Thomas
Clarence Thomas is a Black conservative Supreme Court Justice known for his sexual harassment of Anita Hill and his political emphasis on self-reliance.
Anita Hill
Anita Hill is a Black lawyer and academic who accused Clarence Thomas, her former supervisor, of sexual harassment after he was nominated to the Supreme Court.
Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton was the 42nd president of the United States. Clinton’s presidency, much like Reagan’s, was characterized by cuts to welfare and an escalation of mass incarceration. This earned him the title of “New Democrat.” Unlike Reagan, however, Clinton’s rhetoric tended to emphasize racial progress and “reconciliation.”
Maxine Waters
Maxine Waters is a Black California Congresswoman.
C. Delores Tucker
C. Delores Tucker was a Civil Rights activist critical of what she termed “Gangsta rap.”
Evelynn Hammonds
Evelynn Hammonds is a Black feminist professor, formerly based at M.I.T. and now Harvard. In 1994, she organized the conference “Black Women in the Academy: Defending Our Name.”
Richard Herrnnstein
Herrnnstein was a Harvard psychologist and coauthor of the racist defense of general intelligence The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.
Charles Murray
Murray was a Harvard political scientist and coauthor of The Bell Curve.
Dinesh D’Souza
D’Souza was a former aide to Ronald Reagan. In his book, The End of Racism, D’Souza claimed that racism had ended while simultaneously defending the notion that Black people are less intelligent than other racial groups.
John J. Dilulio
Dilulio was a Princeton professor and inventor of the racist term “super-predator.”
Mumia Abu-Jamal
Mumia Abu-Jamal is a Black journalist and political prisoner.
John McWhorter
John McWhorter is a Black conservative linguist who developed the idea that Black people were self-sabotaging, preventing their own progress.
Dorothy Roberts
Dorothy Roberts is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who works at the intersection of race, gender, law, and science.
George W. Bush
George W. Bush was the 43rd president of the United States. He was widely criticized for his neglectful handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster in 2005. He is George H. W. Bush’s son.
Bill Cosby
Bill Cosby was a Black actor who starred in the assimilationist TV series The Cosby Show. He later went on what was nicknamed a “blame-the-poor-tour” in which he blamed working-class Black people for their own struggles.
Kanye West
Kanye West is a Black American rapper who caused a scandal in the wake of the Hurricane Katrina disaster by pronouncing live on television, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”
Crystal Mangum
Crystal Mangum is a Black woman who falsely accused a group of white lacrosse players from Duke University of rape.
Joe Biden
Joe Biden was vice president of the United States alongside President Barack Obama. Kendi notes that when Obama initially announced his run for president in 2007, Biden made notably racist remarks about the candidate, which he later retracted.
Michelle Obama
Michelle Obama is Barack Obama’s wife.
Glenn Beck
Glenn Beck is a conservative commentator who labelled Obama as racist against white people.
Michelle Alexander
Michelle Alexander is a legal scholar and author of The New Jim Crow (2010).
George Zimmerman
George Zimmerman was a Latino man who killed Trayvon Martin in Florida in 2012.
Trayvon Martin
Trayvon Martin was an unarmed Black teenager whom George Zimmerman shot and killed in 2012.
Shereese Francis
Shereese Francis was a Black woman who was suffocated and murdered by the NYPD in 2012.
Rekia Boyd
Rekia Boyd was a Black woman who was shot and killed by an off-duty Chicago police officer in 2012.
Shantel Davis
Shantel Davis was a Black woman who was shot and killed by an NYPD officer in 2012.
Patrisse Cullors
Patrisse Cullors is an activist and cofounder of the #BlackLivesMatter movement.
Opal Tometti
Opal Tometti is an activist and cofounder of the #BlackLivesMatter movement.
Alicia Garza
Alicia Garza is an activist and cofounder of the #BlackLivesMatter movement.
Georges Cuvier
An early 19th century segregationist anatomist who is considered “Europe’s most distinguished intellectual,” Georges Cuvier dissects Sarah Baartman's body after she dies in 1815, and concludes that Baartman's Khoi people are closer relations of monkeys than white humans.