A review by tictactoney
Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 by Ibram X. Kendi

hopeful informative sad fast-paced

5.0

Love the format of this book!! Bite-sized essays, only a few pages each, each by a different author/specialist, covering in five-year increments the whole of Black history in America since the arrival of the White Lion, the "Adams and Eves of Black America". It's sweeping, yet succinct. It challenges the way Black history in America has been taught, remembered, and edited:
"When we are creating a shared history, what we remember is just a revelatory as what we forget."

Taken as individual essays, you learn SO MUCH reading this book. Every essay invites you to do more research into that small topic, every essay whets your appetite, every essay makes you want to become a specialist so you can go dismantle that one thing. (I in particular wanted to run to the library after the maroons chapter & the Harlem Renaissance chapter!)

Taken in concert, the book shows how small moments in history all added up to where we are now. Like, here's a quote from Ijeoma Oluo's essay that I really liked:
"My mother is white and I am Black because in 1630 a Virginia colonial court ordered the whipping of Hugh Davis..."
Nothing happens in a vacuum, no event is isolated; every little victory and every injustice brings us to 2024, to where we are now. A really great book to add to your anti-racist library.