As Many Voices as Possible

It’s difficult to cover the long span of American history in a single volume. To start, an author has to decide when “American history” begins—with Indigenous people who lived in North America before European colonization? With the establishment of permanent colonies like the Spanish St. Augustine, Florida, or British Jamestown, Virginia? Or, as the New York Times’ “1619 Project” has argued, does the arrival of enslaved Africans on the continent mark a specific turning point?

With Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619–2019 (One World), historians Ibram X. Kendi (Boston Univ.) and Keisha N. Blain (Univ. of Pittsburgh) use this arrival as the starting point for a massive new project. Spanning 400 years of history and including contributions from 90 writers, Four Hundred Souls considers the place of African American history from the arrival of Black Africans on the North American continent through the Obama administration and beyond. Eighty writers contributed brief essays covering 5-year periods, with 10 poets writing pieces about 40-year periods. With such a mission, it’s surprising that the volume comes in at just 528 pages.

Perspectives spoke with co-editor Blain about how this volume came together. Blain and Kendi have worked together on projects since 2016, as editors in the early days of the Black Perspectives blog and as co-authors of various op-eds. Kendi first approached Blain with the idea to commemorate the 400-year anniversary of African captivity in late 2018 and asked her to collaborate on the project. She jumped on board immediately, and they worked quickly to draft a book proposal and sketch out a plan for such a challenging project. Because they knew they wanted to reach a general, non-academic audience, the pair approached editor Chris Jackson at One World, an imprint of Random House. Kendi had worked with Jackson on his best seller How to Be an Antiracist, and the pair knew that One World would steward the project well.

From the beginning, the “community history” aspect was important to both editors. As Blain said, “We could have decided to simply write a book about the history of Black America—and I think we could have pulled it off quite well. However, that model would not have represented the spirit of community we envisioned.” It was important to Blain and Kendi to include the voices of many writers—and not just historians. “Community history is fundamentally about allowing members of the community to drive the narrative. In order to truly tell a community history, we needed to weave in as many voices as possible, and from as many perspectives as possible,” she said.