Stamped from the Beginning: Chapter 25: The Birth of a Nation Summary & Analysis

During World War I, the U.S. government halts immigration from Europe, which means that Northern employers head South seeking a new supply of industrial laborers. Meanwhile, many Black people in the South are desperate to escape a place that, in the words of Du Bois, can feel “worse than hell.” This is the beginning of the Great Migration. Those who arrive in Northern cities soon realize that they still face the discrimination and racist ideas that they fled in the South. Meanwhile, a smaller migration is also taking place of African and Caribbean individuals moving to the U.S. This includes Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican who arrives in New York in 1916.

Visiting the offices of the NAACP, Garvey is shocked by the number of white faces he sees there. He soon founds his own organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, which uplifts Black autonomy, African culture, and “the beauty of dark skin.” Those who resent the NAACP’s “colorism, class racism, assimilationism, and nativism” eagerly join UNIA instead. As light-skinned biracial people take on a more prominent place in American culture, some react with the racist (and colorist) interpretation that all of Black people’s talent and achievements should be credited to biracial people alone. At the same time, others commit to the idea that biracial people are “abnormal”; there is a particular anxiety over those who can pass as white.

Eugenicists and other segregationists vehemently oppose interracial marriage and reproduction, stressing the importance of upholding the “purity of the White race.” At the end of World War I, an “embittered” Austrian soldier named Adolf Hitler enters the German political arena championing eugenicist ideas. Eugenicists such as Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman—the inventor of the IQ test—develop standardized intelligence tests as a way of measuring the comparative intellectual power of different races. The SAT test is also invented by a eugenicist who believes that higher intelligence is produced by white genes.

In 1918, Du Bois travels to Paris and reports on the challenges and heroism of Black soldiers in Europe for The Crisis. This body of writing shows that Du Bois is still struggling to reconcile his assimilationist and antiracist tendencies. He still writes about colonization as a largely positive and “benevolent” phenomenon. When Germany is forced to pay reparations by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, its African colonies are divided up among the victorious European nations. President Wilson fears that the comparatively better treatment Black soldiers experienced in France during the war will lead them to expect more upon returning home to the U.S.

President Wilson’s concerns are well founded: in an issue of The Crisis so controversial the U.S. Postal Service refuses to deliver it, Du Bois calls for an escalation of the fight for racial equality. This moment marks a turning point for Du Bois, who has finally come to see that the uplift suasion and education do not work. In their place, he calls for Black people to “protest and fight” against racism. Those who, like Du Bois, are refusing to accept the racist treatment directed at them are termed “New Negroes”. This wave of resistance in turn provokes a vicious white backlash, particularly during the Red Summer of 1919. This is largely separate from the Red Scare—the fear of communism—that erupts around the same time.

Despite the fact that capitalism and modern racism emerged in the same historical period and are inextricable from each other, communists of the early 20th century largely fail to appreciate how integral race is to capitalist exploitation, and they adopt a discriminatory attitude to Black workers. It is during this time that Du Bois himself devotes himself to reading Karl Marx and in 1920 publishes an essay collection entitled Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil. In this book, Du Bois argues that segregationist beliefs in Black inferiority are not produced by ignorance but by passionate belief and thus cannot be educated or persuaded away.

Darkwater also contains one of the only testaments to the beauty, value, and dignity of Black women that has thus far been published in print. At the same time, Du Bois’s redeeming mission ends up creating a false stereotype of the Black “super-woman.” Overall, however, Darkwater is a remarkably antiracist book, and as such it earns ire from the white press. Black readers tend to praise it, although some critique the elitism still very much present in Du Bois’s worldview. For his part, Du Bois is highly critical of Garveyism; he describes Garvey’s followers as “the lowest type of Negroes, mostly from the West Indies.” Du Bois also denies the existence of colorism within the African American community. In doing so, Kendi writes, Du Bois denies a reality of which he must have been aware, yet afraid to discuss. 

In 1921, Du Bois and Garvey engage in a major dispute over President Warren G. Harding’s condemnation of “racial amalgamation.” While Du Bois denounces Harding in The Crisis, Garvey supports a separatist—though not segregationist—approach to race relations. These two positions reflect broader splits among the Black American community between “assimilationists, antiracists, and separatists, between the classes, between natives and West Indians, between nationalists and Pan-Africanists, and between light skins and dark skins.” Yet the real threat Garvey faces is not from any Black person but rather from the U.S. government, who have deemed him a national threat.  

In 1924, the Immigration Act is passed in order to stem the flow of non-Nordic immigrants to the U.S. Du Bois himself dreams of a world in which people of all races and nationalities contribute to the U.S.’s diversity. Yet in advocating for the positive role Black people have played in the nation, Kendi writes, Du Bois falls back on racist stereotypes such as the assertion that Black people are naturally sensual, with a “tropical love of life.”