How to Tell 400 Years of Black History in One Book

In August of 1619, the English warship White Lion sailed into Hampton Roads, Virginia, where the conjunction of the James, Elizabeth and York rivers meet the Atlantic Ocean. The White Lion’s captain and crew were privateers, and they had taken captives from a Dutch slave ship. They exchanged, for supplies, more than 20 African people with the leadership and settlers at the Jamestown colony. In 2019 this event, while not the first arrival of Africans or the first incidence of slavery in North America, was widely recognized as inaugurating race-based slavery in the British colonies that would become the United States.

That 400th anniversary is the occasion for a unique collaboration: Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019, edited by historians Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain. Kendi and Blain brought together 90 black writers—historians, scholars of other fields, journalists, activists and poets—to cover the full sweep and extraordinary diversity of those 400 years of black history. Although its scope is encyclopedic, the book is anything but a dry, dispassionate march through history. It’s elegantly structured in ten 40-year sections composed of eight essays (each covering one theme in a five-year period) and a poem punctuating the section conclusion; Kendi calls Four Hundred Souls “a chorus.”

The book opens with an essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones, the journalist behind the New York Times’ 1619 Project, on the years 1619-1624, and closes with an entry from Black Lives Matter co-creator Alicia Garza writing about 2014-19, when the movement rose to the forefront of American politics. The depth and breadth of the material astounds, between fresh voices, such as historisn Mary Hicks writing about the Middle Passage for 1694-1699, and internationally renowned scholars, such as Annette Gordon-Reed writing about Sally Hemings for 1789-94. Prominent journalists include, in addition to Hannah-Jones, The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer on Frederick Douglass (1859-64) and New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie on the Civil War (1864-69). The powerful poems resonate sharply with the essays, Chet’la Sebree’s verses in “And the Record Repeats” about the experiences of young black women, for example, and Salamishah M. Tillet’s account of Anita Hill’s testimony in the Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

“We are,” Kendi writes in the introduction collectively of black Americans, “reconstructing ourselves in this book.” The book itself, Blain writes in the conclusion, is “a testament to how much we have overcome, and how we have managed to do it together, despite our differences and diverse perspectives.” In an interview, Blain talked about how the project and the book’s distinctive structure developed, and how the editors imagine it will fit into the canon of black history and thought. A condensed and edited version of her conversation with Smithsonian is below.

How did the Four Hundred Souls book come about?

We started working on the project in 2018 (it actually predates the [publication of] the New York Times 1619 Project.) Ibram reached out to me with the idea that with the 400th year anniversary of the first captive Africans arriving in Jamestown, maybe we should collaborate on a project that would commemorate this particular moment in history, and look at 400 years of African American history by pulling together a diverse set of voices.

The idea was that we'd be able to create something very different than any other book on black history. And as historians, we were thinking, what would historians of the future want? Who are the voices they would want to hear from? We wanted to create something that would actually function as a primary source in another, who knows, 40 years or so—that captures the voices of black writers and thinkers from a wide array of fields, reflecting on both the past but also the present too.

Did you have any models for how you pulled all these voices together?

There are a couple of models in the sense of the most significant, pioneering books in African American history. We thought immediately of W.E.B. De Bois' Black Reconstruction in America in terms of the scope of the work, the depth of the content, and the richness of the ideas. Robin D.G. Kelley's Freedom Dreams is another model, but more recent. Martha Jones' Vanguard, is a book that captures decades right of black women's political activism and the struggle for the vote in a way that I think, does a similar kind of broad, sweeping history. Daina Ramey Berry and Kali N. Gross's Black Woman's History of the United States is another.