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Gomes Eanes de Zurara
The 15th century Portuguese writer is identified in Stamped as the world’s first racist. Zurara (1410-1474) authored a biography of a Portuguese prince, Dom Henrique, that was also a defense of the traffic in enslaved Africans. The book was eventually published as The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea and had an outsized influence in justifying enslavement.
Cotton Mather
Cotton Mather (1663-1728) was a Puritan minister and intellectual in colonial New England. Stamped highlights Mather’s role in promoting the association of Blackness with sin in New England, as well as his founding of Harvard University. Reynolds argues that Mather’s ideas about social hierarchy set the educational agenda at Harvard, America’s first college.
Thomas Jefferson
The chief author of the Declaration of Independence and the third President of the United States, Jefferson (1743-1826) is a complicated figure in American history and in Stamped. On the one hand, he wrote eloquently about liberty and often deplored certain racist ideas. On the other, he enslaved people on his plantation, wrote disparagingly about Phillis Wheatly and other Black people, and derided Black possibility in his book, Notes on the State of Virginia. In Stamped, he is characterized as the kind of person who loudly asserts that he has “Black friends.”
Phillis Wheatley
Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784) was an enslaved poet in colonial Massachusetts. Wheatley was famously interrogated by a panel of learned white men, none of whom believed a Black woman could be the author of such brilliant poetry. They were wrong.
William Lloyd Garrison
The white antislavery activist William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879) was the founder of The Liberator, an abolitionist publication. Garrison’s assimilationist views evolve across Stamped as he becomes increasingly antiracist. Although he withdraws from public life after the abolition of slavery, his last months are spent raising funds to help Black Americans escape the supposedly “free” South after the Civil War.
Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) was a 19th-century orator, author, and intellectual who escaped enslavement. After writing Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass in 1845, Douglass became an important antislavery activist, lecturing in both the United States and England. Even so, Reynolds critiques some of his views as more assimilationist than antiracist.
Abraham Lincoln
The 16th President of the United States and author of the Emancipation Proclamation was born in Kentucky in 1809 and was assassinated shortly after the Confederacy’s surrender in 1865, Reynolds asserts that Lincoln’s assassination was a direct result of his support for Black equality and his ultimate decision to end slavery. Even so, Reynolds remains critical of Lincoln, pointing out that his views on racial equality were variable, shifting with the political winds.
Andrew Johnson
Andrew Johnson (1808-1875) was Lincoln’s second term vice president who unexpectedly became president after Lincoln’s assassination in 1865. Reynolds portrays Johnson as a villainous racist for his efforts to suppress Black Americans and appease former Confederates after the end of the Civil War.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett
Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1935) was a fearless journalist who documented the atrocities of vigilante violence during the late 19th century in her book Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases.
Booker T. Washington
Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) was a Black activist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Committed to assimilationist principles, Washington famously urged Black Americans to wait for white people to change their minds. His book, Up From Slavery (1901), was nonconfrontational and he advocated for vocational training and economic success as the best possibilities for Black people during a time of racial violence.
W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) Black activist, sociologist, and author of numerous works on the Black experience in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Du Bois began his long career convinced that he was special, one of the “talented tenth” who should shape the ideas of Black America. According to Stamped, Du Bois gradually became disillusioned with his assimilationist views and grew increasingly antiracist.
Marcus Garvey
Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) was a Black antiracist activist originally from Jamaica. Garvey was disgusted by the NAACP’s partiality toward biracial people and formed his own group, the Universal Negro Improvment Association and African Communities League (UNIA), to support all Black people. He was deported from the United States after serving two years in prison after a 1923 conviction for mail fraud.
Jack Johnson
Jack Johnson (1878-1946) became the first Black boxer to become the heavyweight champion of the world in 1908. Reynolds characterizes him as a threat to the idea of white supremacy.
Emmett Till
A 14-year-old Black boy who was murdered for allegedly whistling at a white woman in 1955. His murder is often considered a catalyst for the civil rights movement.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Born in 1929, King was a Baptist minister and civil rights leader who rose to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s and was assassinated in 1968. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” both argued for the importance of protest and claimed that Black militants were problematic. Stamped argues that King’s views tended toward assimilationism, although he became more antiracist toward the end of his life.
Malcolm X
Malcolm X (1925-1965) was an antiracist activist and minister in the Nation of Islam. He preached Black separation and independence. Opposed to the more conciliatory policies of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X inspired the Black Power movement. He was assassinated three years prior to King’s assassination.
James Baldwin
James Baldwin (1924-1987) was a Black writer whose novels and essays Reynolds hails as “a master class in antiracism.”
Angela Davis
Davis (b. 1944) Black intellectual and feminist celebrated by Reynolds and Kendi as a model of antiracism. Despite political persecution and imprisonment, Davis is unyielding in her support for Black liberation, decrying mass incarceration, racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression.
Barack Obama
Barack Obama (b. 1961) was elected the first Black president of the United States in 2008.
