A new book takes a communal look at a history that has long been buried. Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 collects the work of 90 writers historians, poets, journalists, novelists and activists to tell the stories of Black Americans, from the arrival of the White Lion, which brought enslaved people to the colonies in 1619, to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones writes a chapter on the arrival of the White Lion, a harrowing tale which she calls “classically American.”
“The Adams and Eves of Black America did not arrive here in search of freedom or better life. They had been captured and stolen, forced onto a ship, shackled, writhing in filth as they suffered and starved,” she writes. “Some 40% of Angolans who boarded that ghastly vessel did not make it across the middle passage. They embarked not as people but as property.”
Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain enlist 90 writers to tell 400 years of African-American history
The co-editors of âFour Hundred Soulsâ assembled a chorus of writers, each one taking on a five-year period
By Jonathan Leal Globe Correspondent,Updated February 8, 2021, 12:09 p.m.
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âThis is our story. We must not flinch.â
So writes journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones in her contribution to
The bookâs scope is vast. It unites 90 writers from across cultural and intellectual sectors to evoke the longevity of Black American struggle over four centuries. The result is what Kendi describes as âa community history written by a community,â a âchoral historyâ of Black American life.