Even an abolitionist champion employed the racist brute stereotype against freedmen

Evidence

William Lloyd Garrison was not among those who questioned the brutishness of former slaves. For thirty years, Garrison had moved northerners toward abolitionism by sensationalizing the idea that slavery made people into brutes. Like any racist, he dismissed the evidence that undermined his theory, and hardened his theory with evidence that supported it. In July 1864, Garrison defended Lincoln’s support of laws that restricted the citizenship rights of Blacks. “According to the laws of development and progress, it is not practicable,” Garrison said, to give undeveloped Black men the vote. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 611

Categorization

• XREF: Directly extends Kendi’s assimilationist category — Garrison as a racial liberal who still believed in Black ‘development’ toward whiteness, deploying the same three-way scheme on a figure usually read as a hero.
• DEEPTHINKING: The uncomfortable revelation that the anti-slavery movement’s own rhetoric (slavery makes brutes) supplied the assimilating rationale for denying freedmen the vote — ‘development’ doctrine as a non-segregationist but still racist position.