Stamped from the Beginning Characters

Jefferson Davis was a 19th-century Mississippi senator who went on to become president of the Confederacy. In a 1860 speech he claimed that the “inequality of white and black races” in America was “stamped from the beginning.”

Crenshaw was a legal scholar who developed the concept of intersectionality.

Richard Mather was a Puritan minister and colonial settler who arrived on American shores in 1635. He was one of the founders of Harvard College and Cotton Mather’s grandfather.

John Cotton was another Puritan minister and Cotton Mather’s other grandfather. He wrote the first constitution of New England, which legalized the purchase of enslaved people during war.

Ibn Battuta was a 14th-century Moroccan scholar and traveler who traveled to the area now known as Mali and wrote about his experiences.

Ibn Khaldun was another 14th-century Arab scholar who believed in the climate theory of Black inferiority.

In the Old Testament, Ham is the cursed son of Noah. Throughout history, certain scholars chose to argue that Black people were the descendants of Ham. This is known as the curse theory of Black inferiority.

Prince Henry was a 15th-century Portuguese royal who oversaw colonization and slave trading missions in West Africa.

Gomes Earnes de Zurara was a Portuguese writer who documented Prince Henry’s life and work in The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, which is arguably the first surviving written record of anti-Black racist ideas.

Queen Isabel was Prince Henry’s great-niece and the sponsor of Christopher Columbus’ journey to Asia, which resulted in him accidentally landing in the Americas.

Christopher Columbus was an Italian explorer and colonizer whose (accidental) encounter with the Americas launched the European colonization of the North and South American continents.

Pope Leo X freed and christened Leo Africanus after being presented him as a gift.

George Best was an English travel writer who questioned the climate theory of Black inferiority.

William Perkins was a Cambridge theologian who, in his 1590 essay Ordering a Familie, characterizes the relationship between masters and slaves as a “loving family relationship.”

William Shakespeare was an early modern playwright, arguably the most famous writer in the world, who explored themes of race and colonization in his plays (notably Othello and The Tempest).

Ben Jonson was an English playwright who wrote The Masque of Blackness.

Queen Anne was an English queen who performed in blackface at the premiere of Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness.

King James was an English king who expanded the British colonial territories in North America.

Pocahontas was an indigenous woman who was captured by British colonists and taken to England, where she was toured as an example of a “civilized savage.”

John Pory was an English colonist who lived in Jamestown and was the English translator of Leo Africanus’ Geographical Histories of Africa.

Elizabeth Key was an enslaved biracial woman who sued for her freedom after it was not granted as promised by her white legislator father in 1655.

Richard Ligon was the English author of A True and Exact Historie of the Island of Barbadoes (1657). In it, he argued that Black people are naturally “docile” and that the enslaved should be allowed to convert to Christianity.

Robert Boyle was an English scientist who developed the idea that black skin is a corruption of the normal default of white skin.

Increase Mather was Cotton Mather’s father.

Maria Cotton was Cotton Mather’s mother.

Richard Baxter was a British minister who argued that slavery could be positive and benevolent as long as the enslaved were permitted to convert to Christianity.

John Locke was a famous English philosopher and physician who was an advocate of polygenesis, arguing that West Africans are descended from both humans and apes.

Metacomet—known as King Philip in English—was sachem, or leader, of the Wampanoag people.

Aphra Behn was an English author and playwright who wrote Oronooko: or, the Royal Slave (1688), the first novel that repeatedly characterizes its characters as white or Black.

James Blair was an enslaver, commissary of Virginia, and the founder of the College of William & Mary.

John Saffin was a New England businessman and judge who in 1700 refused to free a Black indentured servant, Adam.

Adam was an servant indentured to John Saffin.

Samuel Sewall was a Boston judged who denounced John Saffin’s refusal to free his black indentured servant Adam and slavery in general, although he advocated for Black people to be removed from New England and taken back to Africa.

Onesimus was an enslaved man whom Cotton Mather held in captivity after being given him as a “gift.”

Boylston was a Boston doctor who successfully inoculated his young son against smallpox alongside two enslaved people based on African medicinal techniques.

Peter Jefferson was Thomas Jefferson’s father and the owner of a large tobacco plantation in Virginia, Shadwell.

Voltaire was a French Enlightenment philosopher who condemned slavery yet advocated for polygenesis and a natural hierarchy of races.

John Woolman was a New Jersey Quaker who wrote the famous abolitionist tract Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes (1746). Woolman’s largely antiracist argument, Kendi notes, was ahead of its time.

Samuel Howell was a self-emancipated biracial man whose legal case Jefferson took soon after graduating law school.

Francis William was a free Black Jamaican man who was sent to the University of Cambridge in order to prove Black people’s capacity for “civilization.” After returning to Jamaica, he opened a school and enthusiastically disseminated assimilationist ideas.

David Hume was a renowned Scottish philosopher who Kendi points out was both a staunch racist and an abolitionist.

Benjamin Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers.

Selina Hastings was an Englishwoman (whose title was the Countess of Huntingdon) who sponsored the production of Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography.

Born in what is currently southern Nigeria, Equiano was captured and enslaved as a child before purchasing his freedom and writing The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789).

Edward Long was an enslaver living in Jamaica who in The History of Jamaica supports the polygenesis theory.

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher and one of the most influential thinkers in Western history. He disputed polygenesis, but not European supremacy.

Samuel Johnson was an English writer who mocked the American Revolutionary elite for their hypocrisy in championing freedom while at the same time enslaving people.

Adam Smith was a highly influential Scottish economist who wrote The Wealth of Nations (1776).

George Washington was one of the Founding Fathers, a celebrated general in the Revolutionary War, and the first U.S. president. He delayed addressing the question of abolition because he argued it is not the right time, falsely claiming that anti-Black “prejudice” was waning on its own.

Martha Jefferson was Thomas Jefferson’s wife. She died in 1782.

Samuel Stanhope Smith was a Presbyterian minister who advocated for the climate theory of Black inferiority.

James Wilson was a Supreme Court Justice who, before being nominated to the Court, proposed that enslaved people should legally count as three-fifths of a person.

Elbridge Gerry was an American politician and abolitionist.

Polly Jefferson was Thomas and Martha Jefferson’s daughter.

Banneker was a free Black men who wrote a letter to Jefferson in 1791 encouraging him to lend support to Black people against the tide of anti-Black racism.

Benjamin Rush was a Philadelphia physician who falsely informed Black people that they were immune from yellow fever, which led to thousands of avoidable deaths.

Eli Whitney was the inventor of the cotton gin.

John Adams was another Founding Father and the second president of the United States.

Henry Moss was a Black man with a skin condition called vitiligo, wherein skin loses its pigment. Benjamin Rush believed that Moss represented a miraculous hope for Black people’s ability to physically assimilate into whiteness.

Henri Gregoire was a French abolitionist scientist and author of An Enquiry Concerning the Intellectual and Moral Faculties, and Literature of Negroes.

Sarah Baartman was a Khoi woman who was captured and cruelly exhibited in France.

Gabriel Prosser was an enslaved rebel who organized a rebellion in Virginia in 1800 with Nancy Prosser.

Nancy Prosser was the co-organizer, with Gabriel Prosser, of the 1800 rebellion.

Denmark Vesey was an enslaved person who attempted to stage a Haitian Revolution-style coup due to take place on July 14,1822. He recruited a large number of rebels for his “army” before being betrayed by fellow slave Peter Prioleau.

Peter Prioleau was an enslaved man who betrayed Vesey and gained freedom as a reward. He went on to become an enslaver himself.

Samuel Cornish was a Black preacher and coeditor of the nation’s first Black newspaper, Freedom’s Journal.

John Russwurm was the third Black person to graduate from an American college and coeditor of Freedom’s Journal.

Robert E. Lee was Commander of the Confederate army during the Civil War.

Benjamin Lundy was the editor of the abolitionist journal Genius of Universal Emancipation.

David Walker was a Black abolitionist and author of the visionary antiracist, antislavery pamphlet, Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World.

Maria Stewart was an early Black feminist and abolitionist.

P. T. Barnum was a famous 19th-century showman.

Nat Turner was an enslaved man who staged a rebellion after receiving instructions via a vision from God. Turner successfully killed at least 57 people during the rebellion, starting with his master’s family.

Dew was a pro-slavery professor at the College of William & Mary who advocated against colonization.

Calhoun was a fervently pro-slavery South Carolina senator who twice served as vice president of the United States.

Jarvis was a Harvard-educated psychiatrist who developed racist research that argued that slavery was psychologically beneficial to Black people.

Nott was a Southern scientist and enslaver who argued that biracial women were less fertile than those of “purely” African or European descent.

Gliddon was a pro-slavery Egyptologist.

Cartwright was a doctor and former student of Benjamin Rush who claimed that enslaved people suffer from a disease called “dysesthesia,” cured only by submitting to the authority of white people.

Sims was an Alabama doctor who conducted brutal medical experiments on dozens of enslaved women without providing them with anesthesia.

Polk was the 11th president of the United States.

Sojourner Truth was an early Black feminist and formerly enslaved woman who gave the famous speech “Ain’t I a Woman?” in Ohio in 1851.

Delany was a Black writer and doctor often said to be the first Black nationalist.

Pierce was a Northern Democrat and Mexican-American War general who was opposed to abolition. He served as the 14th president of the United States.

Melville was a famous American writer who satirized racist pseudoscience (and particularly polygenesis) in his short story “The ‘Gees.’”

Buchanan was a Democrat and the 15th president of the United States.

Dred Scott was an enslaved Black man who unsuccessfully sued for his freedom in a case that was taken to the Supreme Court. The 1857 ruling, Dred Scott v. Sanford, barred Black people from citizenship.

Taney was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court during the Dred Scott v. Sandford case. He was an enslaver who freed his own captives but continued to champion the property rights of enslavers.

Stephen Douglas was a Democratic senator and prominent critic of Abraham Lincoln.

Helper was a North Carolina critic who wrote The Impending Crisis of the South, a racist argument against slavery that advocates for abolition on the basis of white labor rights.

Brown was a radical white abolitionist who argued in favor of armed insurrection against slavery. He was hanged in 1859.

Darwin was an English biologist who wrote The Origin of Species, pioneering the theory of evolution.

Galton was another English scientist who developed the principle of “nature v. nurture.” He was Darwin’s cousin.

Villard was a German-American journalist and friend of Garrison’s son.

Phillips was an abolitionist and critic of Lincoln.

Frazier was the formerly enslaved editor of The Liberator.

John Wilkes Booth was the proslavery Confederate assassin who murdered Abraham Lincoln at the theater.

Andrew Johnson was the 17th president of the United States. He took over after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. A Democrat, he immediately introduced conciliatory measures with the former Confederacy after assuming the presidency.

Stevens was a “Radical Republican” member of the House of Representatives from Pennsylvania.

Greeley was the pro-segregation Democratic candidate for president in the 1872 election.

Rutherford B. Hayes was the Republican winner of the tightly contested 1876 presidential election. With such a slim margin of victory, Hayes chose to make concessions to Democrats that amounted to the end of Reconstruction.

Mary Silvina Burghardt was W. E. B. Du Bois’s mother.

Williams was a Black historian and writer of History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880.

Otto von Bismarck was an aristocratic German leader who oversaw the unification of Germany in the late 19th century before serving as the first German chancellor.

Vaughan was a Nebraska Democrat who proposed giving a pension to the formerly enslaved.

House was a formerly enslaved woman and founder of the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty, and Pension Association. House’s work can be seen as originating the reparations movement. She criticized the Black elite’s lack of solidarity with poor Black people.

Henry Cabot Lodge was a Massachusetts congressman who proposed legislation to discourage racist voter intimidation that did not pass.

Ida B. Wells was a Black journalist and anti-lynching activist who was singular in her commitment to antiracist thinking.

The 32nd president of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt was a Democrat who oversaw the New Deal.

Booker T. Washington was a formerly enslaved educator, orator, and head of the Tuskegee Institute who made the famous “Atlanta Compromise” speech of 1895. He was the author of the memoir Up From Slavery (1901).

Havelock Ellis was a British sexologist who was the first person to use the term “homosexual.”

Frederick Hoffman was an insurance statistician and author of Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, which argued that Black people were heading toward “gradual extinction.”

Dunning was a Columbia University professor and the developer of the Dunning School of Reconstruction, a group of historians that blamed Reconstruction’s failure on Black people.

Thomas Dixon Jr. was the most influential member of the Dunning School.

William Hannibal Thomas was a Black writer and legislator who wrote The American Negro: What He Was, What He Is, and What He May Become, a book so filled with racist ideas that it led Black people to label him “Judas.”

Theodore Roosevelt was the 26th president of the United States.

Boas was a German Jewish scholar known as the father of anthropology.

Jack Johnson was a Black boxer who made history by being the first Black person to make it to the heavyweight championships final. However, the match was ultimately cancelled after Johnson was arrested on fabricated charges and fled the country.

Jim Jeffries was an American boxer who was the World Heavyweight Champion.

Edgar Rice Burroughs was the American author of Tarzan (1912).

Villard was an American journalist and William Lloyd Garrison’s grandson; considered the “darling of White liberal America.”

Ovington was a white woman journalist, suffragist, and cofounder of the NAACP who expressed assimilationist ideas.

Burroughs was a Black educator and writer who contributed to Du Bois’ special issue of The Crisis on the question of women’s suffrage.

Wilson was a segregationist Democrat elected president in 1912.

Garvey was a Jamaican Black nationalist who clashed with Du Bois in the early 20th century. Garvey was critical of what he saw as the elitism, colorism, and assimilationism of the NAACP and started his own Universal Negro Improvement Association as an alternative.

Hitler was the leader of the Nazi party and Chancellor of Germany from 1934-1945.

Terman was a Stanford psychologist and eugenicist who invented the IQ test.

Marx was a German theorist who developed the political philosophy of communism in the 19th century.

Harding was the 29th president of the United States.

Locke was a writer and Howard University professor famous for his book The New Negro.

Thurman was a Black novelist and an anti-assimilationist Harlem Renaissance artists.

Langston Hughes was a Harlem Renaissance poet and an anti-assimilationist Harlem Renaissance artists.

Carl Van Vechten was a white patron of the Harlem Renaissance and author of the highly controversial novel N_____ Heaven.

An anthropologist who had been a student of Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict invented the term “racism.”

Frazier was a Black sociologist and author of The Negro Family in the United States, which pathologized Black families and argued for an assimilationist solution.

Mammy was a stereotypical Black character from the racist 1939 film Gone with the Wind.

Wright was the author of the hugely influential books Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945).

Bigger Thomas was the tormented main character in Richard Wright’s book Native Son.

James Baldwin was an enormously influential Black writer of the 20th century. He critiqued both Harriet Beecher Stowe and Richard Wright in his essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel.”

Kwame Nkrumah was a Ghanaian anticolonial revolutionary and the first Prime Minister and President of independent Ghana.

Jomo Kenyatta was a Kenyan anticolonial activist and the first indigenous head of government of Kenya, serving as President and then Prime Minister from 1963-1978.

Ashley Montagu was a student of Franz Boas and the author of Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race (1942).

Truman was the 33rd president of the United States. He introduced the Truman Doctrine, which emphasized the U.S.’ role in protecting the freedoms of people around the world.

Patterson was a Black communist leader who in 1951 delivered a petition (signed by Du Bois and other leaders) to the U.N. entitled We Charge Genocide.

Truman’s successor as president, Eisenhower was in power during the early civil rights movement. Facing shame from the international community, Eisenhower enforced desegregation using the U.S. military.

Emmet Till was a 14-year-old Black boy brutally murdered by a lynch mob in Mississippi during the era of “massive resistance” to desegregation.

Elijah Muhammad was the leader of the Nation of Islam, a Black separatist Muslim group of which Malcolm X was a member.

George Wallace was a vocally segregationist Alabama Governor.

Herbert Marcuse was a German Marxist philosopher who taught Angela Davis.

Barry Goldwater was an ultra-conservative Arizona senator who ran for president on the Republican ticket in 1964.

Alex Haley was a Black author who wrote the 1976 book Roots: The Saga of an American Family cowrote Malcolm X’s Autobiography.

Moynihan was a white politician who authored the infamous Moynihan Report, which pathologized the matriarchal structure of Black families in the U.S.

Carmichael was a Trinidadian American activist who graduated from Howard University, served as chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, and is thought to be the first person to use (or at least popularize) the phrase Black Power. He later changed his name to Kwame Ture.

Newton was a young activist who cofounded the Black Panther Party for Self Defense with Bobby Seale. He was murdered in 1989.

Seale was the cofounder of the Black Panther Party with Huey Newton.

Hamilton was the coauthor of the book Black Power with Stokely Carmichael.

Cleaver was a Black Power activist, husband of Kathleen Cleaver, and author of the memoir Soul on Ice.

Kathleen Cleaver was a Black Power activist and the first woman to serve in the Black Panther’s Central Committee.

Nixon was the 37th president of the United States. Nixon introduces the “law and order” style of political leadership, ramping up policing and mass incarceration only for his own presidency to end in the Watergate Scandal, a crime for which he is never incarcerated.

James Brown as a funk musician whose song “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud” helped popularize Black Power.

Beal was cofounder of the Black Women’s Liberation Committee, a subcommittee within the SNCC. She advocates for Angela Davis while Davis is on the run and incarcerated.

Mitchell was the first Black woman to run for president of the United States, on the Communist Party ticket in 1968.

Jonathan Jackson was an American revolutionary who was killed at 17 while storming the Marin County Courthouse in an attempt to free the Soledad Brothers, including his brother George Jackson.

Toni Morrison was a Black novelist considered by some to be the greatest writer in American history.

Maya Angelou was a poet, writer, and activist.

George Jackson was a Black author and revolutionary who was one of the Soledad Brothers. He was killed during an attempted escape from prison.

Audre Lorde was a Black lesbian feminist poet and activist.

Shange was a Black feminist poet and playwright.

Alice Walker was a Black feminist writer.

Wallace was a Black feminist writer, critic, and professor. She’s most famous for her 1979 work Black Macho and the Myth of Superwoman.

Bo Derek was a white actress who became famous for sporting cornrows, which were nicknamed “Bo Braids.”

Kunta Kinte is the main character in Alex Haley’s book Roots, the story of a man (Kinte) who’s kidnapped and enslaved in Gambia and brought to America.

Jimmy Carter was the 39th president of the United States.

Wilson was a Black sociologist and the author of The Declining Significance of Race.

Blackmun was a white Supreme Court Justice who warned against the perils of “race-blind” approach to policy.

Gus Hall was the Communist Party’s presidential candidate in 1980.

George H. W. Bush was the 41st president of the United States.

Michael Dukakis was George H. W. Bush’s opponent during the 1989 presidential race. His defeat was in part credited to the fact that he was perceived to be too “soft” on crime.

Asante was the founder of Afrocentrism and chair of Temple University’s Black Studies Department.

Rodney King was a Black taxi driver in Los Angeles who was brutally beaten by the LAPD in 1991.

Clarence Thomas is a Black conservative Supreme Court Justice known for his sexual harassment of Anita Hill and his political emphasis on self-reliance.

Anita Hill is a Black lawyer and academic who accused Clarence Thomas, her former supervisor, of sexual harassment after he was nominated to the Supreme Court.

Bill Clinton was the 42nd president of the United States. Clinton’s presidency, much like Reagan’s, was characterized by cuts to welfare and an escalation of mass incarceration. This earned him the title of “New Democrat.” Unlike Reagan, however, Clinton’s rhetoric tended to emphasize racial progress and “reconciliation.”

Maxine Waters is a Black California Congresswoman.

C. Delores Tucker was a Civil Rights activist critical of what she termed “Gangsta rap.”

Evelynn Hammonds is a Black feminist professor, formerly based at M.I.T. and now Harvard. In 1994, she organized the conference “Black Women in the Academy: Defending Our Name.”

Herrnnstein was a Harvard psychologist and coauthor of the racist defense of general intelligence The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.

Murray was a Harvard political scientist and coauthor of The Bell Curve.

D’Souza was a former aide to Ronald Reagan. In his book, The End of Racism, D’Souza claimed that racism had ended while simultaneously defending the notion that Black people are less intelligent than other racial groups.

Dilulio was a Princeton professor and inventor of the racist term “super-predator.”

Mumia Abu-Jamal is a Black journalist and political prisoner.

John McWhorter is a Black conservative linguist who developed the idea that Black people were self-sabotaging, preventing their own progress.

Dorothy Roberts is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who works at the intersection of race, gender, law, and science.

George W. Bush was the 43rd president of the United States. He was widely criticized for his neglectful handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster in 2005. He is George H. W. Bush’s son.

Bill Cosby was a Black actor who starred in the assimilationist TV series The Cosby Show. He later went on what was nicknamed a “blame-the-poor-tour” in which he blamed working-class Black people for their own struggles.

Kanye West is a Black American rapper who caused a scandal in the wake of the Hurricane Katrina disaster by pronouncing live on television, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

Crystal Mangum is a Black woman who falsely accused a group of white lacrosse players from Duke University of rape.

Joe Biden was vice president of the United States alongside President Barack Obama. Kendi notes that when Obama initially announced his run for president in 2007, Biden made notably racist remarks about the candidate, which he later retracted.

Michelle Obama is Barack Obama’s wife.

Glenn Beck is a conservative commentator who labelled Obama as racist against white people.

Michelle Alexander is a legal scholar and author of The New Jim Crow (2010).

George Zimmerman was a Latino man who killed Trayvon Martin in Florida in 2012.

Trayvon Martin was an unarmed Black teenager whom George Zimmerman shot and killed in 2012.

Shereese Francis was a Black woman who was suffocated and murdered by the NYPD in 2012.

Rekia Boyd was a Black woman who was shot and killed by an off-duty Chicago police officer in 2012.

Shantel Davis was a Black woman who was shot and killed by an NYPD officer in 2012.

Patrisse Cullors is an activist and cofounder of the #BlackLivesMatter movement.

Opal Tometti is an activist and cofounder of the #BlackLivesMatter movement.

Alicia Garza is an activist and cofounder of the #BlackLivesMatter movement.

An early 19th century segregationist anatomist who is considered “Europe’s most distinguished intellectual,” Georges Cuvier dissects Sarah Baartman's body after she dies in 1815, and concludes that Baartman's Khoi people are closer relations of monkeys than white humans.