Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

Kitwana voted for the first time in 1988. The evolution of “Conscious hip hop” (356), combined with Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential run, got him invested in politics even though he had previously “had no stake in U.S. presidential politics” (355).

Landmark albums from the artists Public Enemy, DJ Kool Herc, and KRS-One integrated socially conscious messages and calls to action for young Black Americans into their lyrics. When the artists mentioned the titles of books in their songs, fans sought out the books and read them. The hip-hop generation played a large role in increasing voter turnout for Barack Obama.

Tillet owns a poster of the ad, “African American Women in Defense of Ourselves” (359), which came out prior to Anita Hill’s testimony against Clarence Thomas. Hill accused Thomas of sexually harassing her while she was his subordinate at the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Tillet remembers seeing Anita Hill for the first time at age 16. Prior to Hill’s testimony she had read Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

As a result of Hill’s accusation, many initially protested Thomas’s nomination. Thomas called the hearings a “high-tech lynching for uppity Blacks” (362), introducing the idea of the Black woman as a race traitor. Bill Cosby and R. Kelly would also compare themselves to lynching victims during their own trials. When the hearings concluded, Thomas had never enjoyed higher support from African Americans: 70 percent backed his nomination.

One year later, Tillet was raped respected Black man from an Ivy League institution. She knew that most Black people would not believe her if she accused him, so she didn’t. But after Anita Hill’s testimony, the amount of reported sexual harassment cases doubled. According to Tillet, the hearing also accelerated the growth of the wedge between Black people and the Republican Party. By 2009, 95 percent of African Americans voted Democratic.

On September 13, 1994, U.S. President Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. He signed the bill on the 23rd anniversary of the Attica Prison Uprising, expanding America’s police force by 100,000 and granting prisons over $12 billion dollars. Davis writes that it “caused immense devastation in Black, Brown, and poor communities” (366). It was one of the primary catalysts of what is now called mass incarceration.

Across the country, the manufacturing industry shrunk and incurred heavy losses. The loss of these jobs encouraged some people to turn to crime: “It was not accidental that the full force of the crack epidemic was felt during the 1980s and early ‘90s” (367).

As a result of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, prison populations grew, prison sentences grew harsher, and the prisons became more restrictive, cruel, and less likely to lead to rehabilitation of any kind, writes Davis.

Kadiatou Diallo married at age 13 in Guinea. She gave birth to a son Amadou at 16. In New York in 1999, police looking for a serial rapist stopped Amadou outside his apartment. When told to put his hands up, Amadou reached in his pocket for his wallet, and the police shot Amadou 41 times. All officers were subsequently acquitted.

Armah explores the word immigrant and the many reasons that it carries such emotional weight. During his campaign and presidency, Donald Trump spoke of immigrants in the same way that led to the fear that killed Amadou, writes Armah. His “brutal killing was a lesson in Blackness for African immigrants” (372).

Douglas recalls an experience she had at Tennessee’s Reelfoot Lake in 1978. A white classmate said to her, sarcastically “You think you something” (374). He thought she needed to be, as the author calls it “depresenced” (374). He implied that she was nothing, and acting as if she deserved to be respected or noticed was a mistake.

Douglas then provides an overview of the effects of Hurricane Katrina, which she considers a racialized and gendered disaster. The abandoned refugees in New Orleans were a metaphor for America’s stance on Black women: “rejected, neglected, and never protected” (375). Barbara Bush callously said that most of the people affected were already low-income citizens. Given that they were accustomed to deprivation, Bush didn’t think they would mind the disastrous living conditions as much. She refused to look directly at the humanity of the people involved, another example of depresencing, the refusal to acknowledge someone’s presence. Douglas concludes by reminding the reader that Black women “did not disappear, and they will not disappear because we know something established power does not: we are something” (377).

A man named Otis Moss, Sr. walked 18 miles to vote for the first time after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He was turned away at three polling stations and died before his next opportunity to cast a ballot. Oprah Winfrey frequently tells this story during election seasons.

Jean-Pierre contrasts Otis Moss’s story with that of Eddie Lee Holloway, Jr., a 58- year-old Black man who in 2016, despite bringing three forms of identification, was denied the right to vote in Wisconsin. Hundreds of thousands of votes were suppressed that year in Wisconsin due to a new voter ID law.

In 2013, the ruling on Shelby v. Holder made voter suppression easier. Barack Obama’s election had been a signal that the country might change direction, and influential racists lobbied for legislation that would make it easier to change logistical voting mechanisms, making it difficult for people like Eddie Lee Holloway, Jr. to vote.

Jean-Pierre states, “When it comes to our democracy, and who we determine to have the right to vote—our most sacred of rights—patience is no virtue. We must never be patient when someone else’s rights are in the balance” (381).

Garza begins with the August 9, 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri by a White police officer. She then describes the formation of the Black Lives Matter movement, which she cofounded with Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi one year earlier. She cites additional instances of police shootings that went unpunished as evidence that Black lives remain trivial in America. She sees hope in the fact that there were more protests in 2014 than any other year.

White nationalism exploded during Donald Trump’s term in office, Garza writes. He “personified the backlash against all those Americans saying Black lives mattered” (385). Garza knows that the backlash will continue, but that the key to continued progress for African Americans is time: “Only time—and strategic organizing—will tell the next four hundred years of African America” (385).

Bennett’s poem is written in abecedarian style, arranged in alphabetical order. Every letter of the alphabet receives a word, phrase, or sentence corresponding with the themes of the book. For instance: “L is for loss. L is for loveliness. L is for lean in the cups of boys in white shirts billowing free in Mississippi town so small, they are visible only when passing through them, like death” (387).

“I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams” (389) is a common saying in Black communities. Blain wonders what her ancestors dreamed about. She is not certain that the challenges Black Americans face today were her ancestors’ wildest dreams. Nevertheless, Four Hundred Souls is a testament to the ongoing dream and to Black Americans who have overcome unimaginable suffering to reach this point.