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

"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.