Assimilationists celebrated Black cultural and curricular conformity to White norms, while antiracists opposed it.

Evidence

Howard University philosopher Alaine LeRoy Locke was master of ceremonies. Cultural advancement would “prove the key to that reevaluation of the Negro which must precede or accompany any considerable further betterment of race relationships,” Locke prophesied in the era’s definitive anthology, The New Negro (1925). He proposed media suasion by “our talented groups” to persuade away racist ideas. … By the time the protest fever subsided at the end of the decade, many of the rules had been expunged, and HBCU curricula, aside from a handful of Negro Studies courses, were hardly distinguishable from the curricula at historically White colleges and universities (HWCUs). Accommodators and antiracists were upset, but assimilationists were delighted. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 837

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concretizes the assimilationist position: it wants Black culture and curricula to become indistinguishable from White ones, and reads that convergence as progress.
• XREF: Sharply illustrates the assimilationist-vs-antiracist split from this book’s core three-way scheme, showing how assimilationists were ‘delighted’ by the very convergence antiracists resisted.