payment page
In Section 5 of Stamped, which includes chapters 21–28, Reynolds focuses on some of the key figures of the civil rights movement and on various manifestations of white resistance to calls for racial equality in America. Throughout this section, Reynolds centers the story of Angela Davis (born in 1944), a controversial Black feminist, activist, and scholar who has faced persecution from the political establishment. The section shifts between Davis’s personal experiences and broader historical events. Davis’s story begins with the 1963 bombing of a church in her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four young girls whom Davis knew. Davis mourned the tragic loss while studying abroad. Meanwhile, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 helped to advance the cause of Black equality. Reynolds argues that the Civil Rights Act allowed white people to claim that racism had ended, but he characterizes the Voting Rights Act as the most successful antiracist legislation ever. But like all antiracist victories, it inspired rage and resistance, leading to the assassinations of Malcolm X (1965) and King (1968).
Read about the backgrounds of Stamped authors Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi.
Davis’s experience and education led her to embrace antiracism at a time when many other Black activists were taking aggressive antiracism stances in the 1960s, only to be met by resistance and suspicion from whites. For example, Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) chairman Stokely Carmichael called for Black Power, a movement that Reynolds characterizes as Black people taking control of their communities and living free from white supremacy, which was misunderstood by white people as a militant call for Black supremacy. Into the Black Power movement stepped the Black Panther Party, which demanded self-determination, employment, housing, freedom for Black prisoners, and military exemptions for Black men. Toward the end of his life, King, no longer open to assimilationist views, launched the Poor People’s Campaign to work for racial and class equality. People were protesting everywhere, agitating for equal rights, for the end of the war in Vietnam, and for fair housing and labor practices. Reynolds suggests that such calls for social change led to a backlash from white America in the form of a film, Planet of the Apes (1968). Set in a future where Apes rule the world, Reynolds argues that the film serves as a dystopian allegory for Black Supremacy and the destruction of the U.S.
Outside the movie theaters, white fears were impacting politics in more direct ways. President Richard Nixon’s election showed how deftly racist ideas could be manipulated to win white votes. Using coded references to “thugs,” “dangerous elements,” and “urban” blight, Nixon and his minions stoked fears among white voters without using explicitly racist language. Davis, by then a professor at UCLA, advocated for bold antiracist positions, urging students to resist the government, and defending young Black men who had been unfairly imprisoned. But, in 1970, Jonathan Jackson, a 17-year-old student and a friend of Davis, took five people hostage in a standoff that ended in the death of several of the hostages and of Jackson himself. Police said that Jackson had used a gun that was registered to Davis, and she was charged with murder. If convicted, she would face the death penalty. Chapter 23 explains how Davis used her time behind bars waiting for trial to study the law, the letters she received, and the cause of freedom. She defended herself successfully and was freed. But, as Reynolds notes, Davis did not think her freedom was the only thing that mattered. She wanted all Black people to be free.
Read about how learning about the past can empower people in the present (Main Idea #3).
The power of Black women is an important part of the final section of Stamped. Reynolds celebrates Ntozake Shange’s 1976 poetic monologues, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, Audre Lorde’s essays and poems, Alice Walker’s novel, The Color Purple (1982), and Michele Wallace’s controversial 1979 nonfiction work, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. Stamped suggests that white Americans responded with Rocky, a film in which a white boxer squares off against a Black one. But many people, Black and white, watched Alex Haley’s Roots. Black artists were not silent and, in 1988, hip hop burst on the scene. Developed in the South Bronx in the late 1970s, hip hop became the sound of empowerment. Many artists wrote songs urging their audience to fight. Black directors made movies with the same theme while Black feminists studied how racism and sexism intersected.
Reynolds characterizes Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs, which began in the 1980s, as a thinly veiled war on Black people that was cynically designed to punish Black drug offenders more seriously than white ones. Within a few years, the War on Drugs led to the mass incarceration of Black people, which not only emptied homes but also stripped people of the right to vote and the possibility of a better future. The predominantly white media largely embraced racist narratives that criminalized Blackness, as exemplified by a white newspaper columnist who coined the phrase “crack baby” to demonize even the very youngest Black people. The beating of Rodney King by officers of the Los Angeles Police Department in 1992 made clear that racism and violence would not go away on their own. Bill Clinton became president and passed a crime bill that continued to fill prisons, trying to show that Democrats were tough on crime. As in the 19th century, junk science emerged to “prove” the supposed inferiority of Black people, and the O.J. Simpson trial (1995) split the country along racial lines. The solution, many thought, was to embrace “color blindness,” to pretend that race didn’t matter.
The early 2000s introduced a charismatic Black politician to the American public—Barack Obama. Despite sustained efforts to smear him, Obama won the presidency in 2008. Angela Davis’s vote for Obama was the first time she had ever cast a ballot for a candidate from a major political party. Obama’s election was historic and symbolic, but Reynolds acknowledges that Obama took some stances that were more assimilationist than antiracist. Stamped ends by celebrating the antiracist Black women who founded #BlackLivesMatter and urging all readers to #SayHerName.
Read a brief essay entitled “Stamped and the Roots of American Racism.”
