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

Kendi begins the third section of his text with the death of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams on the same day—July 4, 1826. The phenomenon was a news sensation. This coincidence gives Kendi the chance to meditate on how far Adams’s native New England had moved, by 1826, away from abolitionism, saying that “[t]he Revolutionary-era abolitionist movement was pretty much dead” (161). Jeffersonian instincts to deflect and defer a decision on slavery became the norm during his lifetime.

Kendi then introduces William Lloyd Garrison, the core figure of his third section, through the American Colonization Society (ACS), which was founded and flourished during Jefferson’s years. In 1829, the ACS invited 23-year-old Garrison to give their 4th-of-July address. Pious and hardworking, Garrison educated himself while indentured, as a teenager, to the editor of a local publication. Temperance was a cause that interested him personally, as “his absent father had never left liquor, and his older brother had been seduced by it,” so he began work, when free, at a temperance paper (163).

In 1828, however, a traveling Quaker abolitionist named Benjamin Lundy roused Garrison to the evils of slavery. Until that moment, Garrison likely thought that “trying to abolish [slavery] was a hopeless cause” (164); after the meeting, however, Garrison quit the temperance movement for the abolitionist movement.