When Alton Johnson was in school in St. Bernard Parish in the 1970s, the headlines screamed racial struggle as Black people across the nation pushed for equal rights. Yet lessons in school taught him little about the historic oppression behind that inequality.
That's why Johnson brought his granddaughters, Kuryzma Evans, 12, and Canyon Johnson, 9, to Baldwin & Co. bookstore in New Orleans on Saturday and made sure each had her own copy of the young-adult biography of an enslaved man, "Barracoon," by visiting historian Ibram X. Kendi.
Kendi, 41, is the head of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, a professor and author of books for adults as well as kids, including "Stamped from the Beginning," which won the 2016 National Book Award for Nonfiction, and "How to Be an Antiracist," a New York Times bestseller in 2020.
That year, during the country's racial reckoning in the wake of George Floyd's murder, Kendi was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by TIME Magazine.
But he told about 100 people on the bookstore's breezy patio Saturday that he was an indifferent high school student who seldom read books. He joked that his parents said he had a "library of Cliff Notes."
It wasn't until he went to college, at the historically Black Florida A&M University, that he discovered the Black history that made schoolwork feel essential.
Kendi majored in journalism and African American studies, then went on to earn a doctoral degree in African American studies from Temple University.
Politics and misinformation
At Baldwin & Co., Kendi fielded questions about politics, misinformation and the right-wing push to ban certain books in public schools and libraries.
"The more they ban our books, the more we need to print," he said. "Writers need to do what we do best, write."
He said writers should also consider engaging directly in politics. He pointed to Ta-Nehisi Coates, who attended a school board meeting in South Carolina in July to support a high school teacher ordered to stop using Coates' book, "Between the World and Me," in her advanced placement English class. White students had complained that the book, a letter to Coates' son about growing up amid racist brutality in America, made them uncomfortable.
"We need to organize and show up (to meetings) to challenge bad ideas," Kendi said.
Historian and writer Ibram X. Kendi poses with D.J. Johnson, owner and founder of Baldwin & Co. bookstore, at the bookstore Saturday, Jan. 27, 2023.
But the loud backlash, Kendi speculated, might be a sign that "we're winning," as painful truths finally come to light.
Inflammatory rhetoric
He also criticized the inflammatory rhetoric of social media and politics.
"We are living in a time when White Americans are being fed 'replacement theories,'" the idea that progress by Black and Brown people will harm them, "even by people who are running for president of the United States," Kendi said. "More and more, White people are taught that people of color are a mortal threat to them."
"This is a dangerous time," the historian warned. "The last time White people were being told this was the Reconstruction era," a time marked by extra-legal violence against Black citizens.
He urged White people in the audience to stand up to racists, "hopefully to know that it is your responsibility to challenge those folks because your voice is actually more powerful. Because of their racist ideas, they listen to you."
"Barracoon," based on interviews by Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston, tells the story of Cudjo Lewis, born Oluale Kossola, who was brought to Alabama from Africa on the slave ship Clotilda in 1860. He died near Mobile, Alabama, in a settlement still known as Africatown, in 1935.
A barracoon was a stockade on the coast of Africa where captives were held until slave traders took them to the Americas.
Kendi, a proud "girl dad," has written other books for children and families including "How to Raise an Antiracist" and "Antiracist Baby."
'Transform society'
The website of the Center for Antiracist Research says its mission is to "transform society by demonstrating that racial injustice is rooted in bad policy and not bad people."
"I think it is critically important to understand racism as structural," Kendi said Saturday, rather than blaming discrimination solely on people's individual decisions.
The center finances research and education across numerous disciplines, including health, social justice and journalism.
Founded in 2020, the center rode the wave of social fury after the murder of Floyd, collecting tens of millions of dollars in donations. In September 2023, the center reorganized, laying off 19 of its 26 employees and abandoning some of its planned programs.
Some former employees alleged mismanagement and criticized Kendi's leadership. However, an audit by Boston University found that the center had spent money appropriately. Speaking to the Associated Press in November, Kendi acknowledged growing pains.
“We were trying to build a new organization from scratch during a pandemic era while responding to the urgency of the moment,” Kendi told the AP.
“I’ve also learned how steep the learning curve is when you have a startup and you’re in the public life.”