American blacks, it would seem, had good reason to be suspicious of Charles Darwin and his theories of human origins. According to one scholar, Darwin's evolutionary hypothesis was by 1900 “the chief scientific authority for racists” in the United States. “His emphasis upon physical differences between races and his theory of natural selection – in fact the whole idea that racial characteristics result from evolution – became cornerstones of scientific racism.” Darwin's influence was “pervasive” according to this interpretation, although popularizers of racist ideas seldom quoted him directly.

If Darwinism was indeed the chief prop of racism in late-nineteenth-century America, one would expect a strong protest against Darwinian evolution by blacks, especially from the educated elite among African Americans. Yet, in fact, there was no strong, sustained black reaction either for or against Darwin and his theories. The story of black responses to Darwinism is complex and marked by unexpected turns. Darwin looms larger in white writings about “the future of the Negro” than in the speeches and writings of important black Americans.

The two most influential black secular leaders of the years between Emancipation and the 1920s, Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, did not find Darwin's ideas particularly threatening. Though neither man publicly endorsed Darwin, each employed a vague concept of evolution in his theory of progress.

In 1854, five years before the publication of The Origin of Species, Douglass had given a lengthy address devoted to “The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered.”