Former SUNY Oneonta Professor

Wins 2016 National Book Award 

ONEONTA – Ibram X. Kendi, former SUNY Oneonta assistant history professor, just won the National Book Award for Nonfiction for “Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America.”

“In the midst of the human ugliness of racism, there was the human beauty,” he said in his acceptance speech when the awards were announced Wednesday in New York City. “There is the human beauty in the resistance to racism.”

Currently an assistant professor of African American History at the University of Florida, Kendi joined SUNY Oneonta in 2009, received his Ph.D. in African American Studies from Temple, and later moved on to SUNY Albany.

A New York City native, he is currently finishing “Black Apple: A Narrative History of Malcolm X and Black Power in New York, 1954-1974” and working on a sequel to “Stamped from the Beginning.”

Lately, he has conducted a workshop at the Cooperstown Graduate Program, and in September delivered a lecture at First Presbyterian Church, Cooperstown.