White-owned racist publishing required Black author credibility to work

Evidence

Mr. Thomas’s book,” Du Bois charged in his review, was a “sinister symptom” of the age, which desired nothing more for “the Negro” than to “kindly go to the devil and make haste about it,” so that the “American conscience [could] justify three centuries of shameful history.” After Black leaders dug up dirt on Thomas and destroyed his credibility, he fell into obscurity. He passed away as a Black man in 1935. He never did become White. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 764

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: the career of William Hannibal Thomas — a Black man who wrote segregationist material defending Whites — as a case study in how racist ideas recruit Black voices to do their legitimizing labor.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s core goal: the irony that a Black-authored racist book was hailed as ‘most authoritative’ while Du Bois’s Philadelphia Negro was dismissed — white-supremacist gatekeeping of who gets believed on race.