National Book Award winner Ibram X. Kendi is youngest in 30 years in the non-fiction category

Ibram X. Kendi hugged his wife, climbed to the stage at the National Book Awards, and turned to address the black-tie-clad literati gathered at Cipriani Wall Street, an event space in New York. His Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (Nation Books) had just won the prize for nonfiction, and he acknowledged, among others, his 6-month-old daughter, Imani, whose name, in Swahili, means "faith."

"Her name of course has a new meaning for us as the first black president is set to leave the White House and as a man who was emphatically endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan is about to enter," said Kendi. "I just want to let everyone know that I spent years looking at the absolute worst of America. … But in the end, I never lost faith … that the terror of racism would one day end."

Winning a National Book Award would be a career capstone for almost any scholar. For Kendi, it’s all the sweeter coming so early in his career. Stamped From the Beginning is only his second book, and the assistant professor of African-American history at the University of Florida is only 34, the youngest person to win the award in nonfiction in more than 30 years.

Academic excellence did not come easily to Kendi. As a freshman at a public high school in Queens, N.Y., he got poor grades, doing "just enough to stay on the basketball team," he said by phone the day after winning the award. His parents moved the family to Manassas, Va., where Kendi became more interested in his studies — "because I had no friends and nothing else to do," he said, laughing.

After studying journalism and African-American studies as an undergraduate at Florida A&M, he entered the graduate program in African-American studies at Temple University. His parents, both now Methodist ministers, were student activists in college, inspired by black-liberation theology. Kendi, too, became active on campus, as well as in the surrounding North Philadelphia community, helping to establish a black student union and to organize a response to the Jena Six convictions, and working on local issues. ...