The essays in this book flow and connect together well, unlike most edited volumes that I have read. The collection begins with Nikole Hannah-Jones's essay on the 1619 arrival of 20 Africans in Virginia and ends with an essay by Alicia Garza on the Black Lives Matter movement. Each writer wrote an essay for every 5 years in Black history. In Four Hundred Souls, Ibram Kendi and Keisha Blain have assembled a great group of 90 writers and poets to tell the history of African Americans from 1619-2019. In these pages are dozens of extraordinary lives and personalities, rescued from the archives and restored to their rightful place in America's narrative, as well as the ghosts of millions more.įour Hundred Souls is an essential work of story-telling and reclamation that redefines America and changes our notion of how history is written. In eighty chronological chapters, the book charts the tragic and triumphant four-hundred-year history of Black American experience in a choral work of exceptional power and beauty.Ĭontributors include some of the best-known scholars, writers, historians, journalists, lawyers, poets and activists of contemporary America who together bring to vivid life countless new facets to the drama of slavery and resistance, segregation and survival, migration and self-discovery, cultural oppression and world-changing artistic, literary and musical creativity. Blain, Four Hundred Souls begins with the arrival of twenty enslaved Ndongo people on the shores of the British colony in mainland America in 1619, the year before the arrival of the Mayflower. Kendi, author of the number one bestseller How To Be an Antiracist, and fellow historian Keisha N. An epoch-defining history of African America, the first to appear in a generation, Four Hundred Souls is a chronological account of four hundred years of Black America as told by ninety of America's leading Black writers.Ĭurated by Ibram X.

Four thousand souls