Four hundred souls A community history of African America, 1619-2019

Review by Choice Review

Ed. Note: Choice considers racial justice a cornerstone of its mandate to support academic study. Accordingly, Choice is highlighting select racial justice titles through the creation of long-form reviews such as the one featured here. Though the scope of these reviews will be broader than those applied to our standard 190-word reviews, many of the guidelines regarding what to focus on will remain the same, with additional consideration for how the text under review sheds light on racist systems and racial inequities or proposes means of dismantling them. Our intent is to feature important works on racial justice that will be of use to undergraduates and faculty researching racism and racial inequalities from new perspectives. Four Hundred Souls is a carefully edited collection compiled by Kendi (Boston Univ.) and Blain (Univ. of Pittsburgh), echoing W. E. B. Du Bois's classic, frequently cited The Souls of Black Folk (1903). The ninety authors represented here, including ten poets, are presented as a "choir." It is possible to read the poems that close each of the book's ten parts as a chorus or a lyrical interlude, similar to the spirituals or songs of sorrow that Du Bois quoted as the epigraphs for each chapter in his seminal text. Here, each contributing author was assigned a five-year period to explore the history of African Americans from 1619 to 2019, while the poets were given creative license to write about any period of US history. These short pieces are suitable for younger students of the social media generation, as it is easy to read one in only a few minutes (which will appeal to those with shorter attention spans) and return to the book later without losing the narrative flow. The text is varied, with chapters exploring many different facets of the Black experience, predominantly within the US but also occasionally traveling across the Atlantic, as the book moves progressively through time. A few noteworthy pieces focus on slavery during the earlier periods of US history, including "The Royal African Company" by David A. Love, a former human rights campaigner for Amnesty International in the UK. Having visited the city of Liverpool to explore the evidence of the wealth created by the enslavement of Africans, he reports on the genocidal crimes that were carried out by the Royal African Company, which was owned by the royal family but offered ordinary shares to the public. "The Selling of Joseph" by Brandon R. Byrd considers a more psychological angle, delving into the story of Samuel Sewall, a white businessman involved in the slave trade who was troubled by the evil of holding people as property and tried to justify it with passages from the Bible. He ultimately preached that although Joseph, in the Old Testament, was sold by his own brothers into slavery, he was eventually freed and even forgave his brothers. Moreover, Sewall noted that even though Africans struggled to regain their freedom, they could not have been made by God to be enslaved all their lives. This theme of the African struggle for freedom is a salient one that runs throughout the book, captured most poignantly in Ishmeal Reed's poem "Remembering the Albany 3" (hanged teenagers), which ends with the chant "Black Lives Matter!" Continuing this biblical connection, Dorothy E. Roberts traces the shifting justifications for slavery from the Bible to the rationalism of the Enlightenment in "Race and the Enlightenment," noting how prominent thinkers like Thomas Jefferson excluded Africans from the assertion that all men are created equal on the assumption that Africans were supposedly servile by nature. Similarly, Benjamin Franklin agreed that the number of Africans brought to the US should be limited to protect the purity of the white race. Turning to the intersection of "Blackness and Indigeneity," Kyle T. Mays narrates how Native Americans, who were similarly dehumanized as "savages," formed marital unions with enslaved Africans, giving birth to mixed-race children whose full humanity was also denied by white settlers. Carrying this trajectory into the modern period, Angela Y. Davis reminds readers that the 1994 signing of "The Crime Bill" by President Bill Clinton signaled the continuation of the dehumanization of working-class African Americans who were left unemployed by the deindustrialization of the economy. Rather than create more jobs and fund education and healthcare for all, the response was to fund mass incarceration as part of the law-and-order war on drugs and gangs. Symbolically, the Crime Bill was signed on the anniversary of the bloody Attica Prison uprising, during which dozens of prisoners were shot dead, along with many hostages. These are snapshots of some of the book's particularly notable contributions. However, for a book that promises to offer a "community history," the lack of coauthored pieces is a major limitation. Even the two editors did not collaborate on the introduction and conclusion. This individualism goes beyond single authorship to influence an individualist biographical methodology, according to which most entries focus on stories of individuals. Compounding this challenge, the brevity of the narratives does not always allow authors to fully cover the structural conditions that informed the periods they explore, a style the Combahee River Collective was particularly adept at employing, which Barbara Smith reflects on in her chapter on the group. As an example of this limiting structure, Crystal N. Feimster's chapter "Lynching" focuses on the life of Ida B. Wells without excavating the intersectionality inherent in her writings on lynchings, which revealed that about one-third of those lynched were poor whites, indicating that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. While individual biographies in general can sometimes veer into sensationalism or myopia, the narration of 400 years of slavery requires some deeper examinations of structural and communal processes, with special consideration for how these evolve over time. However, this sense of the long stretch of history, and the intersecting forces that shape it, can get lost in individualist narratives, such as in the concluding chapter, where Blain considers her Grenadian grandmother's dreams for Blain's future. Ijeoma Oludo's chapter offers an interesting reflection on her identity as a Black woman of Igbo-British biracial descent, giving a glimpse into some of the limitations of how race is often broadly considered. While Oludo comes across as apologetic for not identifying with her white mother's race, it is interesting that she does not think to commend the Igbo side of her family for accepting her wholly as an Igbo woman, the converse of which is impossible under white supremacy. This suggests that the book may have been enriched by exploring race beyond the borders of the US and covering more of the impacts of trans-Atlantic slavery on Africa and on other parts of the African diaspora. For instance, closer attention to Africa may have cautioned Kendi, in the introduction, against the Eurocentric tendency to assume that captured Africans on the same ship must have all come from the same point of origin, as in the case of the twenty Africans who were traded for food in Jamestown in 1619 after being kidnapped from a Portuguese ship. In his poem "Upon Arrival," Jericho Brown repeatedly contemplates who was "bought" and who "sold." Appearing to answer in the story of "Sally Hemming," Annette Gordon-Reed contends that it was people like Thomas Jefferson who sold their own flesh and blood. However, the focus on buying and selling perhaps obscures other forms that white supremacy embodied, particularly after the slave trade was outlawed by many states in the US, out of fear of rebellion when the population of Africans rose dramatically, as documented in Du Bois's The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America (1896). Despite many of the authors' repeated observations that Africans first came to the US before Columbus, the book still begins in 1619 and continues on to arbitrarily divide four hundred years of history into five-year, bite-sized segments. Perhaps Molefi Asante's chapter titled "Africa" should have opened the collection, ahead of Nikole Hannah-Jones's "Arrival," to remind readers from the outset that African American history did not commence in chains and on pirate ships, which many of the authors also rightly imply. The chronological approach to covering 400 hundred years of history can also make it difficult to follow and fully parse each of the diverse themes raised by individual authors. For instance, William Darity, Jr. focuses his allocated period (1879--1884) on the burning issue of reparations for enslavement. Following the book's general trend of centering chapters on individual biographic narratives, this chapter focuses on John Wayne Niles, an early leader of the Indemnity Party, which campaigned for reparations. For his political activism, Niles was personally demonized and repeatedly jailed, though eventually freed with help of bail money raised by the community, only to be rearrested and jailed again. The fact that Niles's campaign was organized under a political party should point to the dubious allegations against him as an individual. The massacres against African Americans and the overturning of the first Civil Rights Act by the Supreme Court suggest that Niles was being discredited in his time as part of the resistance against reparations. The chapter could have contextualized these circumstances for young readers by relating the early campaigns to contemporary demands for reparations by people of African descent in the Americas and in Africa today. The editors could have also highlighted this important topic in the index. Overall, this book will be useful to students at all levels of study, with the understanding that readers should go beyond the short chapters included here and seek out other sources that offer greater depth on these topics. Annually, the book will also make an important supplement to Black cultural and political events, such as Kwanzaa and Black History Month, when it should be read and considered within society at large to reconnect to the community history it recounts. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels. --Biko Agozino, Virginia Tech

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by Booklist Review

African American history is a communal quilt, crisscrossed with the stitches of elders, youth, LGBTQ folk, mothers, fathers, revolutionaries, and poets. Editors National Book Award winner Kendi (Stamped, 2016; How to Be an Antiracist, 2019) and historian and writer Blain honor this multilayered heritage in a monumental work of collaborative history. Ninety Black writers each take on a five-year period from 1619--2019, and each 40-year section concludes with a poem. Thus we get Peniel Joseph on the Black Power movement, Angela Davis on the multigenerational disaster of mass incarceration, Alicia Garza on Black Lives Matter, and Isabelle Wilkerson on the Great Migration. Some essays address events and legislation, others cover cultural elements as diverse as spirituals and queer sexuality, and such icons as Sally Hemings, Jack Johnson, and Anita Hill. The poems enhance and elaborate on the historical narratives: for example, Ishmael Reed's searing "For the Albany 3" mocks Thomas Jefferson's egalitarian ideals by reminding us how he "worked them 24/7 without a fee / While he studied Plato's philosophy." Within a few short stanzas, Reed demonstrates how Caribbean slave uprisings exposed the hypocrisy of the American Revolution as he references the Central Park 5, police torture, and the Native American genocide. Like the poem, this seamless collection crackles with rage, beauty, bitter humor, and the indomitable will to survive.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Bestseller Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist) and historian Blain (Set the World on Fire) present an engrossing anthology of essays, biographical sketches, and poems by Black writers tracing the history of the African American experience from the arrival of the first slaves in 1619 to the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. Highlights include journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the New York Times's 1619 Project, on the erasure from American history of the first slave ship to arrive on U.S. soil; University of Kentucky English professor DaMaris B. Hill's lyrical reimagining of how tobacco was cultivated in Jamestown, Va.; and political commentator Heather C. McGhee on the desire to believe that Bacon's Rebellion in 1676 was a "class-based, multiracial uprising against slavery, landlessness, and servitude," despite evidence of the plotters' "anti-Native fervor," Stanford University history professor Allyson Hobbs explores racial passing by fugitive slaves in antebellum America, while historian Peniel Joseph looks at the rise of the Black Power movement in the 1960s. With a diverse range of up-and-coming scholars, activists, and writers exploring topics both familiar and obscure, this energetic collection stands apart from standard anthologies of African American history. (Feb.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

This is an outstanding collection of essays on being Black in the U.S. from 1619 to 2019. The dozens of contributors, including Donna Brazile, Alicia Garza, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Kiese Laymon, and Wesley Lowery, each reflect on a single five-year period of history. The essays consider the social and political effects of Black history on contemporary U.S. society, as well as the legacy of racism that treats people of color, Black people especially, as second-class citizens. The audiobook does not include the book's supporting material, like endnotes or table of contents, but listeners should be able to easily track down sources if they wish to follow up on historic events. Those looking for a more scholarly treatment of the history of racism in the United States should look to Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning. Most essays are read by their author. VERDICT Essential for library collections.--Cliff Glaviano, formerly with Bowling Green State Univ. Libs., OH

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A compendium of essays and poems chronicling 400 years of Black American history. In order to tell the story of Black America, acclaimed scholar Kendi and award-winning historian Blain bring together 80 Black "historians, journalists, activists, philosophers, novelists, political analysts, lawyers, anthropologists, curators, theologians, sociologists, essayists, economists, educators, and cultural critics" and 10 poets. This engrossing collection is divided into 10 parts, each covering 40 years, and each part ends with a poem that captures the essence of the preceding essays. In the opening essay, Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer-winning creator of The 1619 Project, examines the period from Aug. 20, 1619--the symbolic birthdate of African America when "twenty 'Negroes' stepped off the [slave] ship White Lion in Jamestown, Virginia"--to Aug. 19, 1624. The book ends with Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza reflecting on the years between Aug. 20, 2014 and Aug. 20, 2019. The brief but powerful essays in between feature lesser-known people, places, ideas, and events as well as fresh, closer looks at the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the Harlem Renaissance, Brown v. Board of Education, the Black Power movement, the war on drugs, Hurricane Katrina, voter suppression, and other staples of Black American history and experience. Poignant essays by Bernice L. McFadden on Zora Neale Hurston, Salamishah Tillet on Anita Hill, and Kiese Laymon ("Cotton 1804-1809") deftly tie the personal to the historical. Every voice in this "cabinet of curiosities' is stellar, but standouts include Raquel Willis' piece on queer sexuality (1814-1819); Robert Jones Jr. writing about insurrectionist Denmark Vesey, with Kanye West as a throughline; Esther Armah on Black immigrants, and Barbara Smith on the Combahee River Collective, founded in 1974 by Black women who were "sick of being invisible." Other notable contributors include Ijeoma Oluo, Annette Gordon-Reed, Donna Brazile, Imani Perry, Peniel Joseph, and Angela Y. Davis. An impeccable, epic, essential vision of American history as a whole and a testament to the resilience of Black people. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Chapter 1 1619-1624 Arrival Nikole Hannah-Jones Four hundred years ago, in 1620, a cargo ship lowered its anchor on the eastern shore of North America. It had spent sixty-six grueling days on the perilous Atlantic Ocean, and its 102 passengers fell into praise as they spotted land for the first time in more than two months. These Puritans had fled England in search of religious freedom. We know all their names, names such as James Chilton, Frances Cook, and Mary Brewster. Their descendants proudly trace their lineage back to the group that established self-governance in the "New World" (that is, among the white population--Indigenous people were already governing themselves). They arrived on the Mayflower, a vessel that has been called "one of the most important ships in American history." Every fall, regaled by stories of the courageous Pilgrims, elementary school children whose skin is peach, tan, and chestnut fashion black captain hats from paper to dress up like the passengers on the Mayflower. Our country has wrapped a national holiday around the Pilgrims' story, ensuring the Mayflower's mythical place in the American narrative. But a year before the Mayflower, in 1619, another ship dropped anchor on the eastern shore of North America. Its name was the White Lion, and it, too, would become one of the most important ships in American history. And yet there is no ship manifest inscribed with the names of its passengers and no descendants' society. These people's arrival was deemed so insignificant, their humanity so inconsequential, that we do not know even how many of those packed into the White Lion's hull came ashore, just that "some 20 and odd Negroes" disembarked and joined the British colonists in Virginia. But in his sweeping history Before the Mayflower, first published in 1962, scholar Lerone Bennett, Jr., said of the White Lion, "No one sensed how extraordinary she really was . . . ​[but] few ships, before or since, have unloaded a more momentous cargo." This "cargo," this group of twenty to thirty Angolans, sold from the deck of the White Lion by criminal English marauders in exchange for food and supplies, was also foundational to the American story. But while every American child learns about the Mayflower, virtually no American child learns about the White Lion. And yet the story of the White Lion is classically American. It is a harrowing tale--one filled with all the things that this country would rather not remember, a taint on a nation that believes above all else in its exceptionality. The Adams and Eves of Black America did not arrive here in search of freedom or a better life. They had been captured and stolen, forced onto a ship, shackled, writhing in filth as they suffered and starved. Some 40 percent of the Angolans who boarded that ghastly vessel did not make it across the Middle Passage. They embarked not as people but as property, sold to white colonists who just were beginning to birth democracy for themselves, commencing a four-hundred-year struggle between the two opposing ideas foundational to America. And so the White Lion has been relegated to what Bennett called the "back alley of American history." There are no annual classroom commemorations of that moment in August 1619. No children dress up as its occupants or perform classroom skits. No holiday honors it. The White Lion and the people on that ship have been expunged from our collective memory. This omission is intentional: when we are creating a shared history, what we remember is just as revelatory as what we forget. If the Mayflower was the advent of American freedom, then the White Lion was the advent of American slavery. And so while arriving just a year apart, one ship and its people have been immortalized, the other completely erased. W.E.B. Du Bois called such erasure the propaganda of history. "It is propaganda like this that has led men in the past to insist that history is 'lies agreed upon'; and to point out the danger in such misinformation," he wrote in his influential treatise Black Reconstruction (1935). Du Bois argued that America had falsified the fact of its history "because the nation was ashamed." But he warned, "It is indeed extremely doubtful if any permanent benefit comes to the world through such action." Because what is clear is that while we can erase the memory of the White Lion, we cannot erase its impact. Together these two ships, the White Lion and the Mayflower, bridging the three continents that made America, would constitute this nation's most quintessential and perplexing elements, underpinning the grave contradictions that we have failed to overcome. These elemental contradictions led founder Thomas Jefferson, some 150 years later, to draft the majestic words declaring the inalienable and universal rights of men for a new country that would hold one-fifth of its population--the literal and figurative descendants of the White Lion--in absolute bondage. They would lead Frederick Douglass--one of the founders of American democracy--to issue in 1852 these fiery words commemorating an American Revolution that liberated white people while ensuring another century of subjugation for Black people: This, for the purpose of this celebration, is the 4th of July. It is the birthday of your National Independence, and of your political freedom. What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? Fellow-citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, "may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!" To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then fellow-citizens, is AMERICAN SLAVERY. I shall see, this day, and its popular characteristics, from the slave's point of view. Standing there, identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. The contradictions between these two founding arrivals--the Mayflower and the White Lion--would lead to the deadliest war in American history, fought over how much of our nation would be enslaved and how much would be free. They would lead us to spend a century seeking to expand democracy abroad, beckoning other lands to "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free," while violently suppressing democracy at home for the descendants of those involuntary immigrants who arrived on ships like the White Lion. They would lead to the elections--back-to-back--of the first Black president and then of a white nationalist one. The erasure of August 1619 has served as part of a centuries-long effort to hide the crime. But it has also, as Du Bois explained in The Souls of Black Folk , robbed Black Americans of our lineage. Your country? How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed we were here. . . . ​Actively we have woven ourselves with the very warp and woof of this nation,--we fought their battles, shared their sorrow, mingled our blood with theirs, and generation after generation have pleaded with a headstrong, careless people to despise not Justice, Mercy, and Truth, lest the nation be smitten with a curse. Our song, our toil, our cheer, and warning have been given to this nation in blood-brotherhood. Are not these gifts worth the giving? Is not this work and striving? Would America have been America without her Negro people? We cannot fathom it. Black Americans, by definition, are an amalgamated people. Our bodies form the genetic code--we are African, Native, and European--that made America and Americans. We are the living manifestation of the physical, cultural, and ideological merger of the peoples who landed on those ships but a year apart, and of those people who were already here at arrival. Despite the way we have been taught these histories, these stories do not march side by side or in parallel but are inherently intertwined, inseparable. The time for subordinating one of these histories to another has long passed. We must remember the White Lion along with the Mayflower, and the Powhatan along with the English at Jamestown. As Du Bois implores, "Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?" The true story of America begins here, in 1619. This is our story. We must not flinch. Excerpted from Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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