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Section 4 of Stamped, which includes chapters 15–20, chronicles the struggle to redefine Black identity roughly from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the Civil Rights movement. These chapters repeatedly revisit the long career of the Black intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois, a revered figure in Black history but a complicated figure in Stamped. According to Reynolds, Du Bois begins his career as “the king of uplift suasion,” the idea that Black people should try to better themselves and play by the rules of white society until white people eventually accept them as equals. Booker T. Washington, a contemporary Black scholar and rival of Du Bois, similarly (but more directly) argued that Black people should work hard and wait patiently until white people decided to treat them as equals.
Reynolds derides both Du Bois and Washington as assimilationists, and contrasts them with one of their contemporaries, the antiracist journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Du Bois and Washington did not get along (despite Reynolds’s claim that their ideas were somewhat similar), setting up what Reynolds calls a “battle of the Black brains.” While (according to Reynolds) Du Bois and Washington tended to blame Black people for their mistreatment, Wells, a Black female journalist, examined hundreds of Black lynchings in her book Southern Horrors, a searing indictment of vigilante violence. Her researched showed that most victims of lynchings were unjustly killed for rapes they had never been criminally charged with. Her work showed that abiding by the law, as Du Bois and Washington counseled, would not convince racist white people to accept Blacks as equals.
Section 4 also discusses Black people’s ability to use the world of entertainment to achieve financial and social security in spite of fierce discrimination. Many of the artists and athletes mentioned in these chapters were important precursors to Black performers today. Chapter 16 introduces Jack Johnson, a Black heavyweight fighter who became the world champion. Johnson’s dominance in the ring was an affront to white racists who believed Blacks were inherently inferior. Their inability to find a “Great White Hope” to defeat Johnson led to a cultural backlash from white people. Since white people couldn’t beat Johnson in the ring, stories of white superiority emerged in books and film as compensation. For example, Tarzan of the Apes, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, comforted anxious white readers with a story that presented Black people as fierce savages and the white Tarzan as the sole guardian of civilization and goodness. An early movie, Birth of a Nation (1915), presents the story of a Black man who tries to rape a white woman and is subsequently lynched by the Ku Klux Klan, who the film portrays as heroes.
Black people began to organize in this period to advocate for their rights. Du Bois and Oswald Garrison Villard, the grandson of William Lloyd Garrison, formed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Although the NAACP advocated for Black people, some suggested that it seemed to devote most of its attention to light-skinned and biracial people. Partly in response, the Jamaican-born political activist Marcus Garvey created a second organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). At the same time as they were organizing, Black people also demonstrated their support for the United States, as when Black men volunteered to fight in World War I. But, when Black soldiers came home, they were not recognized as heroes, a response that affected Du Bois’s attitude. Du Bois increasingly called for protests of white supremacy and resistance to racism. The summer after the war ended—known as the Red Summer of 1919—was a bloody one as race riots sprang up around the nation. Black people had had enough.
In 1926, a group of Black artists that included poet Langston Hughes argued that Black people should show their whole selves in art, regardless of whether white people would approve. They looked to Blues singers like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith as models. By then, Du Bois was also advocating such antiracist positions. In response to a racist book by Claude G. Bowers about the Reconstruction era, The Tragic Era: The Revolution after Lincoln (1929), Du Bois wrote Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880. Where Bowers argued that Reconstruction made white people victims of Black people, Du Bois showed that racist white elites had conspired to implement white supremacist policies that would keep Black Americans under their yoke. Reynolds argues that with this book, Du Bois turned from assimilationist arguments toward antiracism. As the Great Depression showed that white people would only take care of their own, Du Bois became even more committed in his antiracism, arguing that Black people needed safe spaces where they could be free from the pernicious effects of surveillance and white supremacy.
After World War II, a new push for equal rights emerged. President Harry Truman tried to implement a civil rights act but failed. Still, during Truman’s administration, two key Supreme Court cases were decided: Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) and Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The first addressed unequal treatment in housing and the second in schools. Reynolds argues that both decisions angered white people and led to a racist backlash. In 1955, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black child, was gruesomely murdered in Mississippi, allegedly for whistling at a white woman. His mother insisted that his mutilated body be photographed in his coffin, and the images horrified the world. Till’s death influenced an Atlanta minister, Martin Luther King, Jr., along with many young Black people, who began to organize in new ways. A key event occurred in 1960, when four Black college students sat at a “Whites only” lunch counter at a Woolworth’s store in North Carolina. Even though they were denied service, they remained at the counter until the store closed.
Nonviolent protests, often formed by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), were a hallmark of the Civil Rights Movement. Marches, sit-ins, and protests often inspired violent reactions. When peaceful protests drew the wrath of the segregationist police chief, events in Birmingham, Alabama, attracted national attention. King and many other protesters were jailed and, while incarcerated, King wrote his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” It is a gripping statement of the power of just protest, but it also suggested that Black separatists, like the Nation of Islam, were problematic. King did not agree with the arguments put forward by Malcolm X, a minister in the Nation of Islam, who took a more militant approach to Black liberation. Malcolm argued for Black self-sufficiency. The disagreement between Malcolm X and King splintered the movement. In Chapter 20, Reynolds notes that Malcolm’s positions were antiracist while King’s were sometimes assimilationist.
Read about Main Idea #3: Learning about the past can empower people in the present.
