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Zusammenfassung von Four Hundred Souls

Name: Four Hundred Souls
Rating: 4.4 (67 reviews)
Author: Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain

Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain

A COMMUNITY HISTORY OF AFRICAN AMERICA, 1619–2019

4.4 (67 Bewertungen)

35 Min.

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Black Lives Matter Geschichte der USA Schwarze Geschichte

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What’s in it for me? A rich history of the African American experience.

In 1619, a few dozen Africans stepped off a slave ship and onto the shores of a colony called Virginia. This handful of souls were the first Black residents of a land that would one day become the United States of America – but they would not be the last.

These blinks present a few glimpses into a complex, contested history that spans 400 years. To do this, they draw insights, reflections, and analysis from ninety different authors, historians, thinkers, and activists. This collection weaves together portions of these many contributions to tell stories of courageous leaders, revolutionary social movements, and everyday people to present a nuanced discussion of race, identity, struggle, and hope. These diverse perspectives flesh out a rich and multilayered account of Black America and explore what this history can tell us about contemporary American culture.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

why southern states resisted Black migration north;
how racism evolved in colonial America; and
what makes Hurricane Katrina a pivotal moment in history.

The story of America is deeply entangled with the practice of slavery.

In popular mythology, the story of America began in November of 1620, when the English colonial ship, Mayflower arrived on the shores of Massachusetts. The story goes on to herald its Pilgrim passengers as some of America’s first non-native residents.

Yet, just a year earlier, another English ship docked farther south along the coast, in Virginia. The arrival of this ship, White Lion, also deeply shaped the course of America’s history. Like the Mayflower, this ship had an English crew. But inside, it transported about two dozen captives from Angola.

These enslaved people were sold as property to Virginia’s English colonists. Unlike the Pilgrims, we don’t know their names or individual stories, but their arrival in the “New World” is equally significant in American history.

This is the key message: The story of America is deeply entangled with the practice of slavery.

The tales around these two arrivals, the Mayflower and the White Lion, highlight a foundational rupture in the American story. The Mayflower’s story is framed as human triumph. The Pilgrims crossed the ocean seeking a better life, and built a new society to achieve their vision. By contrast, the captive Angolans on the White Lion arrived as property, already stripped of their humanity. They were transported against their will and denied their own pursuit of happiness.

Africans lived in the New World prior to 1619, too. Spanish and Portuguese slave traders brought many to the Caribbean as early as the 1520s. As colonization continued, the practice of capturing people in Africa and selling them to work as slaves in the Americas only grew. To feed this inhumane industry, Europeans plundered the agricultural expertise and technical skills of many West African communities, including the Mandinka, Peul, Wolof, and Hausa. Over time, this transatlantic slave trade became the largest movement of people in world history.

It’s difficult to understate the depravity of slavery as an institution. Enslaved Africans were denied the basic human rights of autonomy and self-determination. To justify such conditions, Europeans constructed an elaborate ideology in which Blackness was always inferior to Whiteness. Over time, laws both official and unspoken came to enforce this racial divide.

Of course, the settling of America was only possible thanks to Black labor and expertise. By 1649, more than 300 Black people lived in the British colony of Virginia. The colonists relied on these people for their agricultural knowledge and domestic skills. By 1662, a Virginia law declared that all people born to enslaved mothers would also be enslaved. Slavery was thus woven even deeper into the fabric of American society – as we will explore more in the next blink.

Slavery was slowly entrenched by a series of anti-Black laws.

Let’s take a trip to Liverpool. This rainy port city on the western edge of England is a far cry from the tobacco fields of Virginia. Yet there are African figures carved into the facade of its city hall. Down the street, a prominent bank features a relief of young boys in shackles. Here, too, slavery has left an indelible stain.

These homages to human suffering stem from the source of Liverpool’s wealth. Throughout the seventeenth century, England and companies owned by the Crown accounted for two-thirds of the Mid-Atlantic slave trade. Ships departing from Liverpool transported more than 1.5 million enslaved people from Africa to the Americas.

Oppression and injustice were always met with Black struggle and resistance.

On a cool spring night in 1712, a group of two dozen enslaved men, most likely Akan-Asante people from the Gold Coast of West Africa, lit fires at the northern edge of New York City. When white residents arrived to investigate, the band of rebels attacked with guns, clubs, and knives.

The colony’s governor invoked martial law to quell the uprising. In the end, more than 70 enslaved people were executed for their attempt at freedom. The crackdown was brutal. Still, in 1741, the city experienced an even larger, more elaborate revolt.

Black accomplishments defied the scientific racism of the Enlightenment.

Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, famously wrote that all men were created equal. Yet, in 1781, this same man wrote that Black people should be excluded from the democratic process because of, in his words, “the real distinctions which nature has made.”

Such are the contradictions of the Enlightenment. This era ushered in new, more methodical approaches to understanding the world. Nonetheless, Enlightenment thinkers often misapplied scientific concepts to justify racial hierarchy. Leading intellectuals looked at the unequal society they created and absurdly concluded it existed because Black people were naturally inferior.

After the Revolution, slavery flourished.

The American people elected their first president in 1789. Or, to be more accurate, a small faction of white male property owners over the age of 21 elected the president. They chose George Washington: wealthy, well-respected, and the undisputed hero of the Revolutionary War.

He was also a slave owner. In fact, prior to the Civil War, twelve different presidents held enslaved people. Only six did not. For a nation founded on the ideals of freedom and equality, such a statistic seems incongruous.

As opposition to slavery mounted, Black thinkers explored possible futures.

“We wish to plead our own cause . . . .”

Thus begins the first editorial published in Freedom’s Journal, New York’s first Black-owned newspaper. It was written by the founding editors, abolitionists John Russwurm, the first African American to graduate from Bowdoin College, and Samuel Cornish, a Presbyterian minister and journalist.

The victory of emancipation did not deter white racism and violence.

At the outbreak of the American Civil War, President Lincoln was reluctant to enlist Black troops in the Union Army. Early on, when 300 free Black men volunteered to defend Washington, D.C., the War Department turned them away.

Yet, as the war progressed, Lincoln’s views evolved. In 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation freed enslaved people across the country and allowed Black men to fight, albeit in special segregated battalions. By the end, nearly 200,000 free and liberated Black men pushed Union forces to victory in dozens of major battles.

The Great Migration reshaped the geography of Black culture.

It was July 27, 1919, and 17-year-old Eugene Williams was basking in Lake Michigan – a cool retreat from the muggy Chicago heat. Perhaps lost in the feeling, he drifted across the invisible line that divided the waters along racial lines. An onlooker hurled a rock at him. Eugene was struck, and drowned.

The murder pushed the racial tensions in the city past the boiling point. In the weeks that followed, the streets were filled with violence. Dozens were killed and hundreds more injured in what came to be known as the “Red Summer.”

The Combahee River Collective shaped Black activism beyond the Civil Rights era.

In 1947, C. G. Jennings tried to register his daughters at a white high school in Hearne, Texas. His attempt was denied. Fed up with the inequality, he sued, kicking off the fight for school desegregation.

In 1955, James Baldwin published Notes of a Native Son. The collection of astute essays deftly explored Black culture as an expansive global phenomenon. The book sparked conversations across the country.

Black Lives Matter continues a four-hundred-year struggle.

You’re likely familiar with the images. Trees snapping in the wind like twigs. Whole neighborhoods swamped with floodwaters and debris. Desperate people stranded on rooftops, frantically waving at passing helicopters for help.

This was Hurricane Katrina. The 2005 storm devastated New Orleans, a majority-Black city, and the United States government failed to provide adequate relief. In the aftermath, the city lost half of its population. Its poorest residents were scattered around the region, or trapped living in inhumane conditions. Women, subject to gender-based violence and frequently shouldering caretaker responsibilities, suffered particularly.

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Worum geht es in Four Hundred Souls?

Four Hundred Souls (2021) is an innovative and insightful recounting of African American history. This collection brings together ninety different authors to reflect on four-hundred years of struggle, oppression, and hope.

Bestes Zitat aus Four Hundred Souls

The system of racialized slavery that is now seared into the American public consciousness took centuries to metastasize and mature.

—Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain

Wer Four Hundred Souls lesen sollte

Americans curious to explore their country’s layered history
Politically engaged thinkers wishing to understand the roots of current issues
Anyone who wants more insight into the Black experience

Über den Autor

Ibram X. Kendi is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University, and the founding director of the BU Center for Antiracist Research. He is the best-selling author of How to Be an Antiracist, Stamped, and Antiracist Baby.

Keisha N. Blain is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh and president of the African American Intellectual History Society. Her work includes the Washington Post’s “Made in History” section and the book Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom.

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