In 'Four Hundred Souls,' 90 Writers Tell Their Stories Of 4 Centuries Of African America

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.”

Scholars Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain, who edited “Four Hundred Souls,” have been thinking about the 400th year anniversary of Black America for some time.

They wanted to capture centuries of stories and create a physical product that “could not only write history, but be history,” Kendi says.

The editors brought together a community of Black writers who could tell that history as they see