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

The AASS’s tracts both challenged and produced racist ideas, Kendi claims, as they “[presented] slaveholders as evil” but also presented abolitionists as white saviors (177). White enslavers considered the barrage of tracts as an “act of war” (177). As women gained autonomy, especially in the North, white men sought racial and sexual control, making “desperate attempts to maintain White male supremacy” through gang rape and racial violence (178).

Later in the decade, South Carolinian John C. Calhoun emerged as “the most fearless and astute defender of slavery” (178). Calhoun took the stance that slavery “was both a positive good for society and a positive good for subordinate Black people” (178). Even if Garrison and Calhoun saw each other as “the fanatical Devil Incarnate,” Garrison respected Calhoun’s ferocity more than he respected timid gradual abolitionists in the Jeffersonian model (178). Garrison’s nonviolent beliefs continued to gain influence by comparison to Calhoun’s, and, by the end of the decade, “as many as 300,000 had joined the movement” (179).

The abolition movement began to split, though, and antiracists like Peter Paul Simons rose to claim that “Blacks were already a moral people” (179). In addition to popular rhetoric, antiracists also faced the damning “facts” of science: the scientific community across the world seemed to agree “that racial equality did not exist” (179).

Anthropologist Samuel Morton made waves with his 1839 study of skulls in America, which purported that whites had higher intellectual ability than other races. Though most seemed to embrace Morton, one German scientist, Friedrich Tiedemann, refuted Morton with his own study, making “the hard, unpopular choice of antiracism” (180). Kendi cites a tide of racist studies that bent statistical observations to support slavery and polygenesis theory.

Political powers focused on the debate over Texan annexation, which “was guiding the 1844 election” (181). Slaveholders hoped that Texas would join the union as a slave state. Garrison refused to vote, hoping that abolition would not become a too-political issue, but antislavery political groups began to lobby in Washington. When the annexation of Texas proceeded, Calhoun, now Secretary of State, told the British foreign secretary that US slavery would not end because blacks were better off being enslaved. He used “the latest scientific information on the races,” especially Morton’s work, to “[defend] American domestic policy before antislavery Europe” (182).

Abolitionists countered this swell of political and scientific pro-slavery reasoning with the voice of Frederick Douglass, a young runaway. Douglass resented the “dehumanization” he faced when on the speaking circuit in service of abolitionists, though (183). White movement leaders encouraged him to speak more simply in order for his roots to seem more convincing. But his bestseller, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, allowed him to tell “his story and philosophy in full in his own words” (183). It had a “profound effect,” and “showed the absolute falsity of the notion that enslavement was good for Black people” (183).

Garrison wrote the preface to Douglass’s book, and it “was a compellingly racist counterweight to Douglass’s Narrative” (184). At the same time, new racist polygenesis tracts emerged. Telegraph technology took over the press. The Associated Press emerged with it, creating “shorter and simpler stories that told and did not explain” but instead “sensationalized” the news (185). In New Orleans, De Bow’s review became “the preeminent page of southern thought,” airing anthropological and scientific studies to support slavery (185). This created space for researchers like J. Marion Sims, father of American gynecology, to experiment on black bodies without consent or anesthesia.

As Americans agreed upon the annexation of Texas, enabling the vision of their “manifest destiny” to own the whole continent, Mexicans fought back to save their territory (186). By calling the conflict a “war” in which Mexicans were “the aggressors,” President James K. Polk unified the North and South to become pro-expansion (186). As America expanded west, a new movement, the “Free Soilers,” espoused a “middle ground” approach that would emancipate blacks but also exclude them from entering this new land (187).

When Zachary Taylor became president in 1849, Free Soilers joined abolitionists and enslavers in presenting conflicting desires. When Henry Clay proposed the Compromise of 1850 to balance these powers, Calhoun and others “mustered the forces of succession,” recognizing that slavery was on the line (188).

Southerners thought of themselves as ahead of the curve, though. The 1850 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science affirmed, through many studies, the validity of slavery and the goodness of Whiteness. Even if northern politicians angered enslavers, northern scientists seemed to affirm polygenesis. But soon after that meeting, Calhoun and anti-secessionist Taylor both passed away, the Compromise of 1850 passed, and Millard Fillmore, “an intuitive compromiser,” took over the presidency (189). Though Calhoun had opposed the compromise, which would have given the north the power to “eradicate slavery” (188), “the compromise’s signature measure” was the Fugitive Slave Act, which gave enslavers “octopus powers” to pursue runaways into the North (189). 

Kendi explains that in the first half of the 19th century, women’s frustration with male control began to rise. He points to the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention as “the first major collective strike against” this disenfranchisement and the barring of women from voting (191). The intersection of gender and race debates arose at an 1851 rights conference in Akron, Ohio, at which Sojourner Truth spoke.

Though booed and bullied, Truth rose and delivered her signature message: six feet tall, with “bulging muscles,” she faced men who called women inferior and exclaimed: “Ain’t I a Woman? I can outwork, outeat, outlast any man! Ain’t I a Woman!” (192). This “dual challenge of antiracist feminism” called out both men who rejected her gender and women who rejected her race (193). Garrison had published Truth’s words in The Liberator in 1850 and would again after this meeting, inspiring Maine writer Harriet Beecher Stowe to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852 (193).

Stowe’s writing, Kendi claims, accomplished Garrison’s goal of meeting Americans “in the concreteness of racist ideas” while asking them to change “the implications” of these beliefs (193). Essentially, Stowe’s novel claimed that “in order to become better Christians,” white people needed to “constrain their domineering temperament” and end slavery (194).

Central to Stowe’s plot was the “spiritually gifted Black” person, Tom, who was a valuable counterpoint to the racist, white owner, who was “void of soul” (194). Blacks find intellect through whites; whites find soul through blacks. Proponents of colonization, including President Fillmore, found favor with this argument. They used this “proof” of black inferiority and a reason to send blacks abroad, so that they could, in Fillmore’s words, improve themselves without “a humiliating sense of inferiority in the presence of a superior race” (195).

Though Garrison endorsed the text, he took issue with its theology and its endorsement of colonization. Frederick Douglass was “wary” of the text, too, though “he did not criticize her portrait of the ‘soulful’ Uncle Tom” (195). Martin R. Delany, a physician ejected from Harvard Law School at the behest of white students, also decried the text. But Delany’s endorsement of “colonization on Black terms,” as a mode of resisting whites’ presumed authority, still did not question Stowe’s racist ideas (196).

The majority of black male activists, though, were angry about the “Uncle Tom […] stereotype of the weak Black male” (196). Manhood became a central concern, as men sought to “vindicate [their] manhood,” though, as Kendi responds, this was a form of sexism. As Sojourner Truth recalls, “in the 1850s and early 1860s, Black (and White) men were asserting their right to rule women” (196).

Kendi writes a short passage addressing the matter of proslavery opposition novels. Called the “plantation-school,” these novels had types for men and women, who ruled over “animal-like or childlike contented captives” (197). Though not widely circulated, these novels were seen as the antidote to Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

When Franklin Pierce took over the presidency in 1853, he argued that the issue of slavery was “at rest” (197). But the debate between the AASS and the overwhelming segregationist movement continued. Several segregationist texts, including French royalist Arthur de Gobineau’s Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, found readership around the world.

In America, the 800-page Types of Mankind “sold out almost immediately” (198). Some reviewers loved the overview of polygenesis; others responded by recalling Mather’s old idea of spiritual equality. In Harper’s Magazine, Herman Melville released a short story lampooning “the contradictions of polygenesis” (199). Frederick Douglass “mounted a spirited rebuttal” to an audience at Case Western Reserve in 1854 (199). He noted, “in a single sentence,” “the history of racist ideas”: that oppressors will always find a way to justify oppression (199). Still, Douglass’s response slid into “climate theory and cultural racism,” claiming Africanness as barbaric and holding England as the ideal.

Though Garrison and Douglass united on many issues, they “eventually grew apart” (200). Douglass’s call for black organization upset whites, including Garrison, who wrote that those who had been enslaved could not understand “the demands of the movement” or the philosophy behind it (201). Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the text that neither man could fully endorse, calmed their argument through letters to both men (201). 

Kendi writes about the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act for two purposes. First, he shows that it repealed the Missouri Compromise, because both states were able to decide whether or not they would allow slavery. Second, its champion, Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas, was Abraham Lincoln’s foe in his 1854 Senate campaign. The event allows Kendi to introduce Lincoln early in his career. In 1852, Lincoln delivered a eulogy for Henry Clay, “the Great Compromiser,” and expressed his abolitionist but also colonizing views publicly (203).

The Kansas-Nebraska Act “split open Abraham Lincoln’s Whig Party” into the “Know-Nothings,” who demonized immigrants and Catholics, and the “Republicans,” who demonized “slave power” (203). Democrats overpowered both parties, and James Buchanan won the 1856 election. He called for the Supreme Court to “speedily and finally” settle the matter of slavery, though “he feigned ignorance” of the result, to which he was already clued in (203).

Two days later, in Dred Scott v. Sandford, the Supreme Court “ruled the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, questioned the constitutionality of northern abolition, stripped Congress of its power to regulate slavery in the territories, and stated that Black people could not be citizens” (204). Justice Taney, who delivered the opinion, “hoped that Blacks, Free Soilers, and abolitionists would have no constitutional life to fortify their freedom fights against slaveholders” (204). Though Justice Curtis rebuked Taney’s claim that blacks were intended to be excluded from the political community with historical evidence of their original inclusion, most justices seemed only to care about “maintaining their nation’s enriching economic interests” (205).

Highly publicized and distributed debates between Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, in the 1858 elections, addressed the decision. Douglas used tactics of “race baiting” to pull voters away from Lincoln and the Republicans, who would endorse “negro citizenship” (205). But Lincoln, frustrated, affirmed that he still saw essential differences and inequalities between the races. Though Douglas complained that Lincoln changed his views depending on the audience, Lincoln ignored him and took the “offensive” during the final debates. He claimed that a vote for Douglas meant “a vote for expanding slavery” and a vote against new territory for whites to settle in the west (206).

Though Douglas won the debates, Republicans fared better elsewhere. Garrison, who recognized that antislavery movements voted Republican, ceased to criticize and instead worked within the party to keep conversations away from compromise. Lincoln, though, turned to independents as his next focus.

Lincoln and others used The Impending Crisis of the South, a popular text that called to end slavery in order to increase white opportunity, to “oppose slavery without being cast as pro-Black” (207). “Enslavers were furious,” because the message of the text would unite “Free Soilers, abolitionists, and former slaves” against them (207). John Brown’s interracial revolt, in 1859, brought together these forces, and it “affected [enslavers] deeply” (208).

Southerners, led by Douglas’s Democratic Party, sought “unlimited states’ rights and enslavers rights” as conditions for remaining in the Union. Jefferson Davis, in 1860, presented the platform in the Senate. That year, he stood by the idea that the government was “by white men for white men,” as he objected to funding black education later that year (209).

Davis’s “Biblical” polygenesis arguments seemed to be “mainstream” (209). But, Kendi writes, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species was about to disrupt this “ruling conception of polygenesis” (209). Herbert Spencer transformed Darwin’s ideas into “Social Darwinism” (210). He claimed that behavior “was inherited” and called “for governments to get out of the way of the struggle for existence” (210). Americans loved Spencer’s ideas. Sir Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin, also believed that traits like intelligence were hereditary. He “urged governments to rid the world of all naturally unselected peoples” in “a social policy he called ‘eugenics’” (210).

Ultimately, Darwin released Descent of Man, which addressed the idea of race and proved “once and for all that natural selection applied to humans” (211). His argument could be read two ways: “Assimilationists read Darwin as saying Blacks could one day evolve into White civilization; segregationists read him as saying Blacks were bound for extinction” (211).

Invigorated by the idea that black people were not fit to survive, southern politicians felt their cause bolstered. They boldly seceded from the Democratic Party and elected a new nominee, John C. Breckinridge, for the 1860 election. Meanwhile, Republicans united around Abraham Lincoln and “pledged not to challenge southern slavery” but instead to claim that freedom was “the normal condition of all the territories” (212). This strategic indecision focused on building a base that shared one sentiment and would act in the future.

Across the south, though, “secessionist talk” took hold (213). In order to control the momentum of slave rebellions, enslavers could not handle “the loss of federal power, White proslavery unity, and the ability to spread out their enslaved population” (213). Thoughts of the Haitian rebellion still haunted them. Though “Garrison considered secession to be suicidal,” enslavers felt the same way, Kendi writes, about remaining in the Union. 

In December 1860, South Carolina seceded. Kendi writes that leaders framed the loss of the South as the loss of “a state, and soon a region,” that represented remarkable “land and wealth” (214). Because “northern lenders and manufacturers were crucial sponsors of slavery,” and reliant upon southern land and productivity for producing wealth, “they pushed their congressmen onto their compromising knees” to reestablish union (214). Their efforts failed, though, and by the end of February 1861, “the rest of the Deep South seceded” (214).

Jefferson Davis became Confederate President in February 1861. The next month, Lincoln became the Union president. Though Lincoln “did not object to the proposed Thirteenth Amendment, which would make slavery untouchable and potentially reunite the union,” he did claim that he would not allow slavery to be extended (214). Meanwhile, the Confederacy called itself the first government to be built on the “cornerstone” truth “that slavery subordination to the superior race is [the negro’s] natural and normal condition” (215). The South disseminated racist propaganda, highlighting the idea of a slave who preferred slavery to freedom.

In the spring of 1861, the “insurrection” in southern states began (215). Though Lincoln stayed silent about slavery, “to Black people and to abolitionists the Civil War was over slavery and enslavers were to blame” (215). Thousands of runaways attempted to join the Union forces, but the Fugitive Slave Act was upheld with an “iron fist” (216). After the first battle of Bull Run, which the Union lost, they asked Congress to reconsider the Act. In August 1861, Congress passed the Confiscation Act, “which said that slaveholders forfeited their ownership of any property, including enslaved Africans, used by Confederate military” (216). Seized by the Union, this property was “contraband,” neither free nor enslaved (216). 138 physicians cared for 1.1 million people in these “contraband camps”; it was “one of the worst public health disasters in US history” (216).

These vast numbers of runaways began to overturn the illusion, enabled by Southern propaganda, of the contented slave. As slaves ran away, Confederate soldiers and lower-class whites banded together “against their common enemies: wealthy planters” (217). The Second Confiscation Act, of 1862, officially declared enslaved Africans who joined the union free, forever, from servitude. This act set “Union policy on the road leading to emancipation” (218). Only five days later, Lincoln submitted a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation to his cabinet. Though they made no decision, the words leaked.

As a result, talk of colonization arose again. Congress allocated $600,000 for the project. But “Black people made their opposition to colonization loud and clear” (218). Lincoln urged black leaders to embrace the movement. But as his word got out, Garrison, Douglass, and others condemned them: for Douglass, Lincoln “showed his contempt for Negroes and his canting hypocrisy!” (219).

When Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Times, called for Lincoln to enforce emancipation, Lincoln responded in the National Intelligencer. He claimed that any of his actions on the issue of slavery were intended to “[help] save the Union” (219). Lincoln continued to receive criticism until September 22, 1862.

On September 22, “Lincoln issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation,” offering “gradual, compensated emancipation and colonization” and proclaiming freedom for all remaining enslaved people in states still rebelling on January 1, 1863 (220). In order to rejoin the union, slave states would need to “[pledge] loyalty” and “abolish slavery” before 1900 (220). They would be compensated for freeing slaves. If any state reintroduced slavery, it would need to repay the “emancipation compensation” in full (220). Though the Emancipation Proclamation only freed slaves in the union-occupied spaces where Lincoln held power, it inspired hundreds of thousands of black people to escape toward freedom.

Nonetheless, Lincoln was popularly cast as the “Great Emancipator” (221). Garrison was convinced and became “as ardent a defender and deifier of Abraham Lincoln as any Republican” (222). Still, others held back; Kendi notes that the black-owned press was reluctant to embrace what the Pacific Appeal called a “halfway measure” (222). 

In the days following the Emancipation Proclamation, conversation shifted to the futures of black people. Northern racists all saw enslaved Africans as “brutes” (223). Segregationists, though, saw them as incapable of living in a free and civilized society; assimilationists believed that they were capable. Kendi writes that this was the debate, for nearly no one in an authority position introduced antiracist thought to the conversation.

While black soldiers fought with the Union army in an effort to prove their manhood, whites complained about blacks’ presence in the military. White soldiers feared that their manhood and black men’s manhood would be treated as even or equal. Black masculinity was a hot topic for Republican and Democrat politicians, and they used anecdotes of bravery or unruliness, alternatingly, to prove their points.

As the war demanded bodies, and as contingents realized the future need for laboring bodies after the war, popular opinion shifted away from colonization. Lincoln gave up the idea by July 1863, and by 1864, Congress also abandoned it. Instead, Lincoln’s administration realized that black voters and laborers would be loyal to Lincoln’s cause and became determined to leave blacks in the South, “away from the northern and western free White soil” (226).

While many decried Lincoln’s half-baked abolitionism, Garrison, once full of “principled courage” (226) asked for “patience” with the cause (227). He feared that Democrats would band together to seize power and maintain slavery in the next election. For his part, Lincoln embraced the title of Great Emancipator, encouraging freed black people in Maryland, for instance, to behave well. Still, he endorsed a state constitution that kept rights to vote and rights to education out of black hands. In this sense, he followed Jefferson, “[paying] lip service to the cause of Black uplift, while supporting the racist policies that ensured the downfall of Black people” (228).

The American Freedman’s Inquiry Commission (AFIC) sought to propose solutions to the problems of emancipation. One of its commissioners recommended “redistributing confiscated Confederate land to landless Whites and emancipated people” (228). But Maryland and Louisiana, as they rejoined the Union, ignored such requests. And still, none of the commissioners “entertained the idea that Blacks and Whites were truly equal” (228). Through Social Darwinist thought, they concluded that Blacks would “dwindle” from the continent (228). Following Harriet Beecher Stowe’s racist idea, they found that blacks would “soften” the “hardened” national temperament (228). Even Garrison, who had always believed that slavery made black people brutes, supported “[restricting] the citizenship rights of Blacks” (229).

Despite Garrison’s support, everyone felt that Lincoln could not be president again. War morale sank in 1864. But in September, General William Sherman took Atlanta and built support for the Republicans. And so, even despite (or, Kendi writes, perhaps “because of”) black Americans’ rejection of Republicans, the party won the vote and Lincoln was reelected. Sherman and his troops, along with thousands of runaways, chased the Confederates to the coast, burning everything along their way.

War Secretary Edwin Stanton traveled to Savannah and asked Sherman to meet with local black leaders and work out the conditions of their future. The major demand, from spokesman Garrison Frazier, was to hold land. The overarching sentiment was this: “do not force us to work for our former masters and call that freedom” (231). In this way, “Black people were rewriting what it meant to be free” (231). They also rejected the idea that they needed to demonstrate “their equal humanity” in order to live with whites (231). While poor whites were granted land to settle in the American West and given “freedom,” blacks in the South received “handouts”; even within the South, over 90% of land went to northern whites (231).

Sherman responded to the request by allocating forty-acre plots of land for black families on the Sea Islands and across the South Carolina and Georgia coasts. Though assimilationists in the North cried out for “interracial communities,” former slaves thrived in communities apart from the “uplifting” and “enlightened” white men (232).

Lincoln did not pay attention to these early Reconstructionist conversations because he focused on passing the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery, on January 31, 1865. But questions remained about post-emancipation Civil Rights: Douglass and others argued over black suffrage, in particular, in states readmitted to the Union. The relation of black people to the state was a major question taken on by the Freedmen’s Bureau, which was tasked with “[establishing] racial equality before the law,” where the idea seemed impossible (233). The Bureau did help some people, though its leaders still believed in “natural laws” that kept black people subservient and longing for the help of a master (233).

On April 9, the Confederacy surrendered the Civil War. On the occasion of Louisiana’s readmission to the Union, Lincoln expressed a preference for “limited Black suffrage,” and he was the first American president to do so (234). Out of fear of “nigger citizenship,” John Wilkes Booth hatched a plan to kidnap the president; the plan became a murder on April 14.

Three weeks after Lincoln’s assassination, Garrison retired. Though he believed his work as an abolitionist to be over, the AASS did not dissolve and instead focused in on black suffrage under incoming president Andrew Johnson.

Though activist groups like the AASS had high hopes for Andrew Johnson, his Reconstruction proclamations “offered amnesty, property rights, and voting rights to all but the highest Confederate officials” in 1865 (235). Confederates took advantage of this perceived leniency and established black codes that allowed “the law [to replace] the master” (235). Racist ideas that blacks “were naturally lazy, lawless, and oversexed” justified these new laws (235).

Blacks rebuked these accusations. When evicted from their granted land plots in 1865, they protested. Thaddeus Stevens, a “Radical Republican,” wanted “redistribution of the 400 million acres held by the wealthiest 10 percent of southerners” to freedmen, but Congress only forced “the Confederacy’s Native American allies” to give land to those they had enslaved (236).

Defenses against land redistribution called for blacks to “[work] for it” first (236). Republicans believed that “the government was finished,” and that black people had the rights they needed (236). Where Garrison’s “genius” had made abolitionism “a simple, single-issue moral project,” he held back “that genius from the cause of antiracism” (237). He, and others, did not make racism an equally moral evil, and “[t]he assimilationist idea that Black people needed to be developed by northerners” held strong (237). Antiracist Black southerners had no interest in this idea.

After the official adoption of the Emancipation Proclamation, Garrison set aside The Liberator. He watched as Frederick Douglass moved for black male suffrage. He watched as Andrew Johnson responded with concern for blacks’ contempt of poor whites.

Kendi notes that “some—perhaps most—Blacks did look down on poor Whites,” calling them “white trash” (238). Blacks, as “consumers” of racist ideas, upheld the vision of superior Whiteness by excluding poor whites from that ideal (238). “White elites” became “the ordinary representatives of Whiteness” (238).

Anti-black northern politician Lyman Trumbull allied with radical Republicans in an effort to extend rights to black people in the South, largely as a way to keep them out of the north. Johnson vetoed the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill, the first attempt, but Trumbull and his group passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 to similar effect. The act “invalidated [southern and northern] Black codes that had discriminated against Blacks for decades” (239). Kendi notes, though, that the bill “did not target private, local, or race-veiled laws of racial discrimination”; it had many loopholes (239). Even in this “limited form,” Johnson vetoed it (239). Johnson and his Democrat party believed in “reverse discrimination” (239), and feared that the bill would allow blacks to dominate whites.

In 1866, Congress overrode the veto and speedily began Reconstruction. They hoped to stop migration north in the wake of massive anti-black violence, which authorities blamed on black soldiers. Their “uplift” only resulted in racial violence (240).

Though the Fourteenth Amendment, passed in 1866 and ratified in 1868, seemed to please most, it failed to guarantee black male suffrage. Women’s suffragists joined with black male suffragists to form the American Equal Rights Association (AERA) in response. Still, Elizabeth Cady Stanton affirmed at the association’s first meeting her belief that black men in power would be even more repressive than whites. This belief that “the consequence of [a Black man’s] racial oppression” would make the “abused” become the “abuser” became a commonly-held racist idea (242). Sojourner Truth upheld these stereotypes.

The rising labor movement “obscured the color line,” separating men by class instead of by race and thereby “[denying] racism” (242). Together with white capitalists, then, white labor leaders could blame racial disparities on laziness, rather than discrimination. African Americans worked to create opportunities through historically-black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Most adopted an assimilationist agenda, though, championing a “high culture,” white-history liberal arts curriculum (243). Those that focused on vocational training bore a strong component of training that championed “the dignity of hard labor” for black people (243). Levels of learning and labor began to stratify, with light-skinned black people attending liberal arts schools and dark-skinned people at vocational schools. This colorism trickled into many levels of society.

Four Reconstruction Acts, in 1867 and 1868, settled the conditions for constitutions in the ten southern states that would reenter the Union that year. Southern Confederates were forced to accept black male suffrage. The Ku Klux Klan emerged out of its origins as a social club to assassinate Republicans and bar blacks from the polls.

In 1868, Ulysses S. Grant, bolstered by millions of black votes, became president. Recognizing the political power of the black vote, many racist Republicans embraced it and pushed to pass the Fifteenth Amendment, which guaranteed black male suffrage on a Federal level.

Women’s suffrage was largely left out of these discussions. White women used racist beliefs about black men’s literacy and intelligence to push for their own suffrage. Sexist men used the same arguments about women’s illiteracy and ignorance to reject them. At AERA and other groups’ meetings, these arguments grew common: “[h]ypocrisy had normalized in the American reform movements,” and groups came to compete with one another (246). Ironically, the first wave of black male representatives in government were largely on board with women’s suffrage. But instead, and largely because of infighting, women’s suffrage lingered while the Fifteenth Amendment reached ratification in 1870.

Upon the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) declared their work “finished” (248). The Republicans, seeing blacks in possession of a kind of “freedom,” a kind of “equality,” and a kind of “security,” also abandoned the “struggle against racial discrimination” (248).

The atmosphere of Klan violence was palpable immediately. White supremacist thought centered upon the hypersexualized black female body, which could be used as an outlet for white men’s “sexual energies,” and the chaste white female body, which needed to be defended (249). The Klan was also fueled by the uplift suasion intended to win over whites: where “landless Blacks were terrorized by landowners […] landowning Blacks were terrorized by the Klan” (249). In response to “more than 5,000 cases of White terrorism,” Congress passed three Enforcement Acts that turned “Klan-type terrorist attacks into federal offenses” (249). Outer, federal influence was the only way to keep together “southern Republicanism” (250).

Southern constitutional conventions were “alluringly democratic” in the immediate Reconstruction era. With undertrained and inexperienced representatives at the helm, the South gained its “first publicly funded educational systems, penitentiaries, orphanages, and insane asylums” (260). Expanded civil rights, reduced crime, and more democratic local governments were also positive results.

Still, black leaders often stepped aside from positions of authority in these coalitions, in order to avoid Democratic claims that they were taking over power. Black communities also “rarely benefited” from economic policies; instead, “corporations did” (260). Intended to stimulate the economy and provide jobs, much of the welfare given out went to company leaders and bribed politicians. As a result, the south came to rely “on cheap labor” (260).

President Grant came up with a plan, supported by Frederick Douglass, to offer to African Americans that they could immigrate to the Dominican Republic. Assimilationists “encouraged” this expansion, “while segregationists and antiracists discouraged it,” because the latter relied on cheap black labor (251). The plan did not go through.

In the meantime, Lyman Trumbull and Horace Greeley created a group of “Liberal Republicans” who wanted to stay out of the game of propping up the southern poor, especially southern blacks (251). Greeley became a presidential candidate, an “arch-friend of the Confederacy,” and ran for president as a Democrat in 1872 (251). Kendi writes that Greeley’s stance called violence in the south the fault of black politicians’ failures.

Blacks and Republican whites “risked death to win most of the south” and reelect President Grant (252). The Slaughterhouse Cases in 1873 “massacred the civil rights protections of the Fourteenth Amendment,” and Confederates could vote again (253). But The Panic of 1873, “the first major economic depression of American industrial capitalism,” depressed the whole country (253). Southern Democrats claimed that they would be able to restore order.

Kendi writes that “southern Blacks were the most devastated of the devastated” by the economic downturn (253). They walked into sharecropping situations, cycling around land “looking endlessly for ethical landowners” (254). “Nothing seemed to dent racist ideas” of servitude, violence, or exceptionalism, however (254).

The Associated Press, and a collection of articles called The Prostrate State, communicated to the country that the failure of the Reconstruction should be blamed on corrupt black politicism. William Lloyd Garrison and other antislavery Republicans were coaxed out of silence and began to speak out against the anti-black contingent taking over the country. The New York Times reported that their ideas “[represented] ideas in regard to the South which the majority of the Republican party [had] outgrown” (255).

A final bill of Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, “outlawed racial discrimination in jury selection, public transportation, and public accommodations,” but it “hardly stopped” violence toward blacks (256). While one-fifth of the country attended the 1876 World’s Fair in Philadelphia, which depicted black people only once as “plantation ‘darkies,’” William Lloyd Garrison delivered his final speech in Boston. He “recognized racist ideas as the core of the problem” (256).

While Grant continued to stave off southern whites’ desires “to kill negroes and Republicans without fear of punishment and without loss of caste or reputations,” big names in southern politics fought back, blaming conflicts on “Blacks’ natural proclivity for violence and criminality” (257). The work of an Italian doctor, Cesare Lombroso, was translated to English by Havelock Ellis to spread the word that there was a correlation between dark skin and criminal behavior.

When Rutherford B. Hayes (barely)won the presidency in 1877, he also “ended Reconstruction for Republicans” (258). This was, Kendi writes, a move intended to avoid another Civil War. Without the hand of federal support, black people were effectively removed from national politics.

Instead, blacks in the post-Reconstruction south would succeed if they could show “naturally submissive intelligence, or naturally rebellious stupidity” (259). To reassert and intimidate those they hoped to control, notably black people and women, white men took up the practice of lynching; “someone was lynched,” Kendi tells us, “on average, every four days from 1889 to 1929” (259). Hate motivated these killings, but racist ideas undergirded that hate.

In the late 1870s, blacks moved in large numbers to Kansas. Northern allies called them “Exodusters” and raised funds for them (260). Garrison supported the movement. In 1879, from his sick bed, Garrison sent a resounding statement reaffirming that all should “be put in the safe enjoyment of their rights” to vote and be represented in government (260). Garrison had earlier hoped “for immediate emancipation when all hope had been lost,” and he now hoped “for immediate equality when all hope had been lost” (260). This was his last public statement, for he died four weeks later.