Title: Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

Edited By: Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain

Publisher: One World 2021

Genre: Nonfiction - U.S. History

Pages: 453

Rating: 5/5 stars

Reading Challenges: Seasonal TBR

The story begins in 1619—a year before the Mayflower—when the White Lion disgorges “some 20-and-odd Negroes” onto the shores of Virginia, inaugurating the African presence in what would become the United States. It takes us to the present, when African Americans, descendants of those on the White Lion and a thousand other routes to this country, continue a journey defined by inhuman oppression, visionary struggles, stunning achievements, and millions of ordinary lives passing through extraordinary history.

Four Hundred Souls is a unique one-volume “community” history of African Americans. The editors, Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain, have assembled ninety brilliant writers, each of whom takes on a five-year period of that four-hundred-year span. The writers explore their periods through a variety of techniques: historical essays, short stories, personal vignettes, and fiery polemics. They approach history from various perspectives: through the eyes of towering historical icons or the untold stories of ordinary people; through places, laws, and objects. While themes of resistance and struggle, of hope and reinvention, course through the book, this collection of diverse pieces from ninety different minds, reflecting ninety different perspectives, fundamentally deconstructs the idea that Africans in America are a monolith—instead it unlocks the startling range of experiences and ideas that have always existed within the community of Blackness.

This is a history that illuminates our past and gives us new ways of thinking about our future, written by the most vital and essential voices of our present.

This book has been my slow-but-steady for the past two months or so. There is so much information packed into these essays. To properly focus on the essays, I only read one or two a day until I got the end. Many of the facts presented in the book I knew from my college classes. The authors both conveyed the information and the devastating emotions and after effects of the events presented. This is a hard book to read, but absolutely essential to understand the state of our country today.

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