Douglass’s first college address rebutted polygenesis after reading Types of Mankind

Evidence

Types of Mankind was so popular and so influential that it compelled the first major response to polygenesis by an African American. The Reverend Martin B. Anderson, the first president of the University of Rochester, loaned the book to his friend Frederick Douglass. Anderson also handed over works by Nott, Gliddon, and Morton. Douglass used his first formal address before a college audience—Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve on July 12, 1854—to mount a spirited rebuttal. The address was published that year in Rochester, and Douglass recycled the message in other speeches for years. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 529