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

Kendi begins his story of Angela Davis with the story of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing. Davis, whose parents desegregated a neighborhood of Birmingham, Alabama called Dynamite Hill, knew all four of the girls killed in the attack. Davis’s Marxist, antiracist parents raised her to “never harbor or express the desire to be white” (382). As she pursued education at integrated schools in the North, she believed that the white people whom she was expected to “become equal to” were not “worth becoming equal to” (382).

During her student years, she traveled abroad and attended a James Baldwin lecture. She also followed Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, “who would become her intellectual mentor” (383). At a Malcom X lecture, Davis became fascinated “by [X’s] description of the way Black people had internalized the racial inferiority thrust upon [them] by a white supremacist society” (383).

Kendi explains that after the Birmingham bombing, the international community recognized “the naked ugliness of American racism” just as Davis did (383). The event “[forced] Kennedy’s hand” on civil rights, but his expression of outrage caused his approval ratings in the South to drop (383). Kennedy was assassinated in November, on a public relations tour to Dallas.