Some essays address events and legislation, others cover cultural elements as diverse as spirituals and queer sexuality, and such icons as Sally Hemings, Jack Johnson, and Anita Hill. Thus we get Peniel Joseph on the Black Power movement, Angela Davis on the multigenerational disaster of mass incarceration, Alicia Garza on Black Lives Matter, and Isabelle Wilkerson on the Great Migration.
Ninety Black writers each take on a five-year period from 1619–2019, and each 40-year section concludes with a poem. Editors National Book Award winner Kendi ( Stamped from the Beginning, 2016 How to Be an Antiracist, 2019) and historian and writer Blain honor this multilayered heritage in a monumental work of collaborative history. If I were a teenager today, I would carry it in my backpack.African American history is a communal quilt, crisscrossed with the stitches of elders, youth, LGBTQ folk, mothers, fathers, revolutionaries, and poets. This superbly edited book comes right on time in this unenlightened moment in US history and serves as a reminder of a different set of democrats who have creatively turned 400 years of painful, uplifting ugliness into beautiful Blackness, inspiring histories of lifelong democratic struggle to be an unshackled people. All of the poets in the volume lift this history into song. All of the essays in Four Hundred Souls are powerful and beautifully succinct. Woodson, one of the founding organizers of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915, and his generational cohort are smiling down at this book. For me, what is exciting about Four Hundred Souls are the voices of scholars who, with their own rich and diverse Black experiences, use their journalistic, literary, and scholarly muscle to inform a wider public about the continuous historical struggles of their kith and kin in shaping the United States.
an inspiring book of historical observations, poetry, scholarship, and vignettes.
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