Four Hundred Souls is a work of nonfiction.
Copyright © 2021 by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
One World and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Copyright to each contribution is owned by its author. A list of copyright credits begins on this page.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kendi, Ibram X., editor. | Blain, Keisha N., editor.
Title: Four hundred souls : a community history of African America, 1619–2019 / edited by Ibram X. Kendi, and Keisha N. Blain.
Other titles: Community history of African America, 1619–2019
Description: New York : One World, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2020043755 (print) | LCCN 2020043756 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593134047 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593134054 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: African Americans–History. | United States—Race relations—History.
Classification: LCC E185 .F625 2021 (print) | LCC E185 (ebook) | DDC 973/.0496073—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020043755
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020043756
Ebook ISBN 9780593134054
oneworldlit.com
Book design by Barbara M. Bachman, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Michael Morris
Cover art: Bayo Iribhogbe
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
A Community of Souls: An Introduction by Ibram X. Kendi
Part One
1619–1624: Arrival by Nikole Hannah-Jones
1624–1629: Africa by Molefi Kete Asante
1629–1634: Whipped for Lying with a Black Woman by Ijeoma Oluo
1634–1639: Tobacco by DaMaris B. Hill
1639–1644: Black Women’s Labor by Brenda E. Stevenson
1644–1649: Anthony Johnson, Colony of Virginia by Maurice Carlos Ruffin
1649–1654: The Black Family by Heather Andrea Williams
1654–1659: Unfree Labor by Nakia D. Parker
Poem: "Upon Arrival" by Jericho Brown
Part Two
1659–1664: Elizabeth Keye by Jennifer L. Morgan
1664–1669: The Virginia Law on Baptism by Jemar Tisby
1669–1674: The Royal African Company by David A. Love
1674–1679: Bacon’s Rebellion by Heather C. Mcghee
1679–1684: The Virginia Law That Forbade Bearing Arms; or the Virginia Law That Forbade Armed Self-Defense by Kellie Carter Jackson
1684–1689: The Code Noir by Laurence Ralph
1689–1694: The Germantown Petition Against Slavery by Christopher J. Lebron
1694–1699: The Middle Passage by Mary E. Hicks
Poem: "Mama, Where You Keep Your Gun?" by Phillip B. Williams
Part Three
1699–1704: The Selling of Joseph by Brandon R. Byrd
1704–1709: The Virginia Slave Codes by Kai Wright
1709–1714: The Revolt in New York by Herb Boyd
1714–1719: The Slave Market by Sasha Turner
1719–1724: Maroons and Marronage by Sylviane A. Diouf
1724–1729: The Spirituals by Corey D. B. Walker
1729–1734: African Identities by Walter C. Rucker
1734–1739: From Fort Mose to Soul City by Brentin Mock
Poem: "Before Revolution" by Morgan Parker
Part Four
1739–1744: The Stono Rebellion by Wesley Lowery
1744–1749: Lucy Terry Prince by Nafissa Thompson-Spires
1749–1754: Race and the Enlightenment by Dorothy E. Roberts
1754–1759: Blackness and Indigeneity by Kyle T. Mays
1759–1764: One Black Boy: The Great Lakes and the Midwest by Tiya Miles
1764–1769: Phillis Wheatley by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
1769–1774: David George by William J. Barber II
1774–1779: The American Revolution by Martha S. Jones
Poem: "Not Without Some Instances of Uncommon Cruelty" by Justin Phillip Reed
Part Five
1779–1784: Savannah, Georgia by Daina Ramey Berry
1784–1789: The U.S. Constitution by Donna Brazile
1789–1794: Sally Hemings by Annette Gordon-Reed
1794–1799: The Fugitive Slave Act by Deirdre Cooper Owens
1799–1804: Higher Education by Craig Steven Wilder
1804–1809: Cotton by Kiese Laymon
1809–1814: The Louisiana Rebellion by Clint Smith
1814–1819: Queer Sexuality by Raquel Willis
Poem: "Remembering the Albany 3" by Ishmael Reed
Part Six
1819–1824: Denmark Vesey by Robert Jones, Jr.
1824–1829: Freedom’s Journal by Pamela Newkirk
1829–1834: Maria Stewart by Kathryn Sophia Belle
1834–1839: The National Negro Conventions by Eugene Scott
1839–1844: Racial Passing by Allyson Hobbs
1844–1849: James Mccune Smith, M.D. by Harriet A. Washington
1849–1854: Oregon by Mitchell S. Jackson
1854–1859: Dred Scott by john a. powell
Poem: "Compromise" by Donika Kelly
Part Seven
1859–1864: Frederick Douglass by Adam Serwer
1864–1869: The Civil War by Jamelle Bouie
1869–1874: Reconstruction by Michael Harriot
1874–1879: Atlanta by Tera W. Hunter
1879–1884: John Wayne Niles by William A. Darity, Jr.
1884–1889: Philadelphia by Kali Nicole Gross
1889–1894: Lynching by Crystal N. Feimster
1894–1899: Plessy V. Ferguson by Blair L. M. Kelley
John Wayne Niles Ermias Joseph Asghedom Mahogany L. Browne
Part Eight
1899–1904: Booker T. Washington by Derrick Alridge
1904–1909: Jack Johnson by Howard Bryant
1909–1914: The Black Public Intellectual by Beverly Guy-Sheftall
1914–1919: The Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson
1919–1924: Red Summer by Michelle Duster
1924–1929: The Harlem Renaissance by Farah Jasmine Griffin
1929–1934: The Great Depression by Robin D. G. Kelley
1934–1939: Zora Neale Hurston by Bernice L. Mcfadden
Poem: "Coiled and Unleashed" by Patricia Smith
Part Nine
1939–1944: The Black Soldier by Chad Williams
1944–1949: The Black Left by Russell Rickford
1949–1954: The Road to Brown v. Board of Education by Sherrilyn Ifill
1954–1959: Black Arts
by Imani Perry
1959–1964: The Civil Rights Movement by Charles E. Cobb, Jr.
1964–1969: Black Power by Peniel Joseph
1969–1974: Property by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
1974–1979: Combahee River Collective by Barbara Smith
Poem: "And the Record Repeats" by Chet’la Sebree
Part Ten
1979–1984: The War on Drugs by James Forman, Jr.
1984–1989: The Hip-Hop Generation by Bakari Kitwana
1989–1994: Anita Hill by Salamishah Tillet
1994–1999: The Crime Bill by Angela Y. Davis
1999–2004: The Black Immigrant by Esther Armah
2004–2009: Hurricane Katrina by Deborah Douglas
2009–2014: The Shelby Ruling by Karine Jean-Pierre
2014–2019: Black Lives Matter by Alicia Garza
Poem: "American Abecedarian" by Joshua Bennett
Conclusion: Our Ancestors’ Wildest Dreams by Keisha N. Blain
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Notes
Contributors
Permissions
By the Editors
About the Editors
A COMMUNITY OF SOULS
An Introduction
IBRAM X. KENDI
In August 1619, when the twenty “Negroes” stepped off the ship White Lion and saw the British faces, they didn’t know.
As their feet touched Jamestown, Virginia, they didn’t know their lives would never be the same. They didn’t know they would never see their community again.
Maybe they did remember the waters on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean surging into the Cuanza River that flowed into their West African homeland. Maybe they did not, too weary from the Middle Passage to picture Ndongo.
The West African nation of Angola derives its name from ngola, the royal title of Ndongo’s head of state. The twenty Ndongo people who arrived in Jamestown in August 1619 had likely been seized in a slave raid earlier that year in modern-day Angola and brought to the Portuguese port colony of Luanda unaware that they were pregnant with a new community.
In Luanda, they joined about 350 other captured Ndongo people, all now herded like chattel onto the São João Bautista. The Portuguese slave traders set sail for Spain’s plantation colony of Vera Cruz, Mexico. But they never arrived. The White Lion, an English privateer captained by John Jope, and another English privateer, the Treasurer, attacked in the glistening Caribbean waters. Not as abolitionists. As warriors against Europe’s declining superpower at the time: Spain.
The men-of-war kidnapped from the kidnappers a community of sixty or so enslaved people, probably the healthiest and youngest aboard. They divided the human bounty between the Treasurer and the White Lion and headed north to the British colonies.
The twenty or so Ndongo people went into labor as the White Lion sailed up the Atlantic. Historical forces were shaping this community—and the community was shaping historical forces. The community delivered—and was delivered—on Virginia’s shores on August 20, 1619, the symbolic birthdate of African America.
The Ndongo people were not the first people of African descent to land in the Americas. The first arrived before Christopher Columbus. Some people from Africa may have joined Spanish explorers on expeditions to the present-day United States during the sixteenth century. A revolt of enslaved Africans prevented Spanish slaveholders from establishing plantations in current-day South Carolina in 1526. “A muster roll for March 1619 shows that there were already thirty-two African slaves” in Virginia, historian Thomas C. Holt explained. But no one knows how or when they arrived. No one knows the precise birthdate of African America.
Perhaps no one is supposed to know. African America is like the enslaved woman who tragically never knew exactly when she was born. African America is like the enslaved man who chose his own birthday—August 20, 1619—based on the first record of a day when people of African descent arrived in one of the thirteen British colonies that later became the United States. Since 1619, the people of African descent arriving or born in these colonies and then the United States have comprised a community self-actualizing and sometimes self-identifying as African America or Black America. African speaks to a people of African descent. Black speaks to a people racialized as Black.
* * *
—
Black America can be defined as individuals of African descent in solidarity, whether involuntarily or voluntarily, whether politically or culturally, whether for survival or resistance. Solidarity is the womb of community. The history of African America is the variegated story of this more-than-400-year-old diverse community. Ever since abolitionist James W. C. Pennington wrote The Origin and History of the Colored People, the inaugural history of Black America published in 1841, histories of Black America have almost always been written by a single individual, usually a man. But why not have a community of women and men chronicling the history of a community? Why not a Black choir singing the spiritual into the heavens of history? Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619–2019 is that community choir for this historic moment.
Award-winning historian and editor Keisha N. Blain and I assembled a community of eighty Black writers and ten Black poets who represent some of the best recorders of Black America at its four-hundred-year mark. The community is a remarkable sampling of historians, journalists, activists, philosophers, novelists, political analysts, lawyers, anthropologists, curators, theologians, sociologists, essayists, economists, educators, poets, and cultural critics. The writing community includes Black people who identify (or are identified) as women and men, cisgender and transgender, younger and older, straight and queer, dark-skinned and light-skinned. The writers are immigrants or descendants of immigrants from Africa and the African diaspora. The writers are descendants of enslaved people in the United States.
Most of the pieces in this volume were written in 2019. We wanted the community to be writing during the four-hundredth year. We wanted Four Hundred Souls to write history and be history. Readers of this communal diary will forever know what Black Americans were thinking about the past and present when African America symbolically turned four hundred years old.
Each of the eighty writers here chronicles a five-year span of Black America’s history to cover the four hundred years. The volume’s first writer, the Pulitzer Prize–winning creator of The 1619 Project, journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, covers from August 20, 1619, to August 19, 1624. The volume’s final writer, Black Lives Matter cofounder Alicia Garza, covers from August 20, 2014, to August 20, 2019. Each piece has been written distinctively while being relatively equal in length to the others, making for a cohesive and connected narrative with strikingly different—yet unified—voices. A choir.
And collectively this choir sings the chords of survival, of struggle, of success, of death, of life, of joy, of racism, of antiracism, of creation, of destruction—of America’s clearest chords, year after year, of liberty, justice, and democracy for all. Four hundred chords.
Each piece revolves around a person, place, thing, idea, or event. This cabinet of curiosities of eighty different topics from eighty different minds, reflecting eighty different perspectives, is essential to understanding this community of difference that has always defined Black America.
Four Hundred Souls is further divided into ten parts, each covering forty years. Each part concludes with a poem that recaptures its span of history in verse. These ten poets are like lyrical soloists for the choir, singing historical interludes. Sometimes history is best captured by poets—as these ten poets show. Indeed, the first verses sprang from those original twenty Ndongo people.
* * *
—
Virginia’s recorder general John Ro
lfe, known as Pocahontas’s husband, produced Black America’s birth certificate in 1619. He notified Sir Edwin Sandys, treasurer of the Virginia Company of London, that “a Dutch man of Warr…brought not any thing but 20 and odd Negroes” and traded them for food.
Not anything?
Life was not promised for this newborn in 1619. Joy was not promised. Peace was not promised. Freedom was not promised. Only slavery, only racism, only the mighty Atlantic blocking the way back home seemed to be promised. But the community started to sing long before anyone heard that old spiritual:
We shall overcome,
we shall overcome someday.
There is no better word than we. Even when it is involuntary—meaning to be Black in America is to almost never be treated like an individual. The individual of African descent is not seen. The Black race is seen in the individual. All Black women are seen in the woman. All Black men are seen in the man.
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