Garrison’s single-issue moral abolitionism never extended to opposing racial disparities

Evidence

William Lloyd Garrison and so many of the abolitionists he inspired chose not to engage in the political struggle against racial discrimination. Garrison failed to realize that it was his genius that had transformed abolitionism from a complex, multi-issue political project with unclear battle lines and objectives into a simple, single-issue moral project: slavery was evil, and those racists justifying or ignoring slavery were evil, and it was the moral duty of the United States to eliminate the evil of slavery. Garrison did not use his genius again for antiracism, in declaring that racial disparities were evil, and that those racists justifying or ignoring disparities were evil, and that it was the moral duty of the United States to eliminate the evil of racial disparities. He was too bogged down by the assimilationist idea that Black people needed to be developed by northerners. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 633

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concretely illustrates the assimilationist position — that Black people needed to be ‘developed’ by northerners — as distinct from both segregationist and antiracist positions.
• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s stated goal of placing arguments into Kendi’s three-way scheme; connects to how gradualist/assimilationist abolitionism differed from radical Black antiracism.