Stamped from the Beginning: Chapter 28: Freedom Brand Summary & Analysis

The Holocaust has a drastic impact on Du Bois and the world around him. Toward the end of World War II, Black Americans discuss the “Double V Campaign,” which refers to defeating both Nazism and American racism back home. In 1936, the Carnegie Foundation commissions a major report on Black people but leaves it in the hands of white scholars, who they claim will be uniquely unbiased. In 1944, the study is published under the name An American Dilemma. It laments the existence of racism, which it claims is caused by ignorance. Du Bois rejects this conclusion, acknowledging that Americans are indeed aware of the reality around them. Yet despite its assimilationist bent, Du Bois praises the study.

As World War II draws to a close, Du Bois unsuccessfully fights for the new UN charter to oppose colonialism. In 1945, he attends the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester alongside future decolonial leaders Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta. Rejecting the prospect of gradual decolonization, the delegates demand immediate independence from colonial rule. The U.S. emerges from World War II as the most powerful nation in the world. The developing field of Black historiography is losing some of its racist tendencies, though remains distinctly masculinist. Meanwhile, Social Darwinism drops eugenics from its agenda.

In 1942, Boas’ protégée, Ashley Montagu, publishes Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, a book that rejects the biological race hierarchy and emphasizes cultural relativism. As scholars increasingly accept that humans (and thus racial groups) are shaped by both genes and social conditions, segregationists still fight to insist that Africans generally have the fewest good genes. Moreover, it is still possible to argue that social conditions have made Europeans the superior culture. In 1947, President Harry Truman introduces the “Truman Doctrine,” arguing that it is the U.S.’s job as “leader of the free world” to protect the freedoms of people around the world. Of course, this invites accusations of hypocrisy given the stark racism that still exists in the U.S. 

In 1947, Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights issues a report that follows up on An American Dilemma and condemns the nation’s failure to protect freedom and equality among its own people. Truman is keen on implementing policies promoting racial equality despite substantial opposition from many white politicians and voters alike. A wave of desegregation cases sweeps the nation. The housing desegregation movement gains the support of a number of different parties, many of whom are not acting on egalitarian principles (for example, the Black elite who do not want to be forced to live among poor Black people). When Black people do start moving into white neighborhoods, white residents frequently react with violence.

The extensive welfare benefits of the G.I. Bill help stimulate the enormous postwar economic boom. This bill “give[s] birth to the White middle class,” increasing the economic disparity between the white and Black communities. It is also at this point that non-Nordic European immigrants such as Italians, Jews, and Irish people are become fully incorporated into the category of whiteness. In the background, the government aggressively pursues anyone they suspect of having communist ties. At 82 years old, Du Bois is arrested; although he is exonerated, the State Department revokes his passport. In 1951, William Patterson delivers a petition to the U.N. signed by Du Bois and other Black leaders entitled We Charge Genocide. The petition condemns the U.S.’s self-styling as “leader of the free world” given its appalling record of anti-Black racism.

In response, the government issues a pamphlet entitled The Negro in American Life, which demonstrates how much better life has become for the elite minority of Black people Du Bois once called the Talented Tenth. When Dwight D. Eisenhower assumes the presidency in 1953, he reverses the Truman Doctrine on the basis that racism is not a problem of social structures, but rather “a failure of individual feelings.” As the debate around desegregating schooling intensifies, those in favor point out that segregated schools have had a devastating impact on Black children’s self-esteem. However, this argument is often grounded in the racist, assimilationist belief that separate Black schools could never be “equal” because they would not be of high quality without white people involved. 

Drawing on this understanding of the psychological damage of segregation on Black children, the Supreme Court rules in Brown v. Board of Education that “in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.” At age 64, Zora Neale Hurston is one of few voices to acknowledge the problem with assuming that Black schools could never deliver quality education on their own. Segregationists and antiracists both praise Hurston’s view; unsurprisingly, assimilationists denounce it. Even as desegregation is now legally mandated, white segregationists prepare “massive resistance” to oppose it.