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

Tisby asks, “How exactly did Christianity in the United States become white? Of course we know that’s not the reality. To this day, Black people remain the most Christian demographic in the country” (43). His answer is that white Christians “retrofitted religion to accommodate the rising racial caste system” (43).

The Virginia Assembly—made up of white men—passed the 1667 law saying that Christian baptism couldn’t free a slave. In England, one Christian could not enslave another. White slave owners could not afford to let spiritual equality mutate into physical equality. White church leaders sanctioned bigotry but treated slavery as a civil issue. White missionaries encountered resistance while preaching to enslaved people.

Some enslaved people found hope in biblical messages like the freeing of the enslaved Israelites in Exodus and the Promised Land. They practiced a “churchless church” (45) and worshipped together. But the gap between the teachings of Jesus and slavery was obvious.

To see peace between racial groups, Tisby believes there has to be change in faith communities, politics, and law. Policy supports racism, and policies often have religious roots. To save religion, spiritual and earthly equality are a must.

Love visited Liverpool in 1998 and experienced the impact of the transatlantic slave trade in ways that surprised him. Britain played a huge role in the human trafficking. He sees that the city still visibly benefits from slavery. There is slavery-related artwork and sculpture.

The Royal African Company (RAC) played the most pivotal transport role in the English slave trade. Although many people benefited from the RAC, it existed primarily to enrich the Stuart family and give them dependence from Parliament. The company quickly built an unassailable monopoly.

After the Emancipation Proclamation, slavery “ended in name only” (49). What Love calls the spirit of the RAC lives on in “unbridled capitalism and monopolistic business schemes designed to monetize human suffering and reap corporate profits from a free and captive labor force” (49). Capitalism continues to benefit from Black bodies, as evidenced in the convict leasing schemes of mass incarceration.

McGhee discusses Bacon’s Rebellion. Nathaniel Bacon’s militia included thousands of men, including many African American indentured servants. Bacon was a wealthy, white Englishman. The rebellion is often celebrated as an American leading the first real rebellion against the British. McGhee sees a different story: she argues that Bacon’s rebellion was Bacon’s method of waging a political war with Governor Berkeley, his enemy. Their dispute centered on the poor job done by Berkeley of defending the borders from Indigenous attacks.

With hindsight, McGhee argues that the real legacy of Bacon’s Rebellion is that a white man used one disenfranchised population to attack another. His use of Black militiamen to oppress Indigenous Americans contains, for McGhee, “Something vexingly American” (54).

Jackson quotes Frances Latimer: “Enslavement happened one law at a time” (55), including gun laws. By 1700 there were over 16,000 enslaved people in Virginia, threatening to become a state majority. To assuage fears of uprisings, laws forbade slaves from gathering, even to hold funerals. They also couldn’t own guns.

Many Virginia landowners violated these laws, allowing their slaves to transport guns while they hunted, or asking them to protect their homes. Jackson argues that white Americans have always benefited from keeping Black people unarmed.

For instance, the National Rifle Association (NRA)—an organization as pro-Second Amendment as it is possible to be— supported disarming the Black Panthers. Jackson argues that this is yet another piece of evidence that “[g]un ownership has always been a tool to secure power—racist white power” (56).

In the late 1600s, enslaved people began fleeing Virginia and North Carolina to Spanish Florida. In 1685 the Code Noir, a set of laws written by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, changed the lives of Black people. The Code—“one of the most extensive official documents on race, slavery, and freedom every drawn up in Europe” (57)—contained laws that regulated the freedoms of Black people and put white people at ease. The financial goal of the codes was to guarantee a thriving sugar industry.

In 1729, France controlled Louisiana. A Black man named John Mingo escaped to New Orleans after fleeing slavery in South Carolina. He married a woman named Therese and they grew successful. If they had had children—there are no records suggesting that they did—those children would be subject to the Code Noire. John and Therese would have had to discourage them from marrying slaves, since the Codes would govern their lives.

Ralph argues that this hypothetical discussion has analogues to the talk modern Black parents must give their children about police. Ironically, New Orleans now has America’s highest rate of incarceration.

Lebron considers the idea of allies—specifically, what makes a good one in civil rights battles, including those involving women, Black Lives Matter, and the queer and trans movements. An ally is “someone who is not being directly harmed by the injustice in question yet who stands with those being harmed” (62). Allyship sometime asks more than they’re willing to give, but less than the oppressed need.

In 1683, 13 families founded Germantown. Five years later, they released what is called the German Quaker petition. It differed from the views of English Quakers on slavery: “They found it an affront to the human condition” (63). It is one of the first documents insisting that Black people are equal human beings. Lebron does not believe that Black people need allies as much as they need to be seen as human equals. Anyone who disagrees must be fought. The idea of an alliance implies mutual benefit, which is not needed.

Mary Hicks describes the role that Portugal played in the transatlantic slave trade. Portugal was a perfect staging ground for sea voyages, given their expertise in sailing and the expert composition of their ships.

Williams’s poem describes a narrator’s constant need for a gun. He names the locations where he might keep one, and it becomes clear that he needs a gun nearly everywhere he goes. He must protect himself, but he also writes, “I keep it thus I am the crime” (69). By the time he needs a gun, he will already be in danger, and “to reach for the gun is to reach for safety in retrograde” (69).