Even in the 1600s segregationist and assimilationist positions divided over Black capability

Evidence

The segregationist belief that enslaved Africans should not or could not be baptized was so widespread, and so taboo to discuss—as Richard Ligon found in Barbados—that virtually no enslaver took to writing to defend it in a major piece in the 1600s. That did not stop the assimilationists, who believed that lowly enslaved Africans, practicing their supposed animalistic religions, were capable of being raised to Christianity. In the 1660s, there emerged a missionary movement to publicize this divine duty to resistant slaveholders and slaves. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 111

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows the segregationist/assimilationist split applying to the baptism debate, useful for placing arguments in Kendi’s three-way scheme.
• XREF: Directly testable against the reader’s goal of placing any race argument into Kendi’s scheme; segregationists denied capability, assimilationists affirmed it as raisable. — connects to: Black women’s groups demanded equal segregated facilities before demanding desegregation — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 1010