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

Bouie writes that by 1864 “nearly 400,000 enslaved people had escaped to Union lines. They had won themselves freedom in the process” (230). Many of them would number among the 180,000 African Americans who would fight in the Civil War.

Lincoln originally pushed back against arming former slaves, but he realized that they would help win the war. By fighting, African Americans also helped shape the aftermath. They realized they were soldiers and political actors who would deserve a place in the Reconstruction discussions. Frederick Douglass said, “Once let the Black man get upon his person his brass letters, U.S.; let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship” (231).

After the war, Black veterans helped establish the Union Leagues, groups that worked to empower African Americans, build schools, and resist white politicians opposed to their cause.

Harriot describes the creation of the Jim Crow era as analogous to the origin story of a supervillain, and “[t]he hero of this drama is Black people” (234).

The Fifteenth Amendment passed on February 26, 1869, granting African American men the right to vote. Terror groups like the Ku Klux Klan sprang up immediately, starting a new war. In North Carolina, the KKK actually overthrew the government, removing Governor Holden for his perceived harsh treatment of Klan violence.

Harriot describes several horrific killings and massacres carried out by members of the KKK who were never punished. He returns to the idea of Black people as the hero of the story, writing, “The most marvelous, unbelievable thing about Black people in America is that they exist. Every imaginable monstrosity that evil can conjure has been inflicted on this population, yet they have not been extinguished. The hero remains” (238).

Journalist Ernest Ingersoll went to Atlanta in 1879 while researching an article for Harper’s Magazine. The dilapidated housing in the Black neighborhoods comprising Shermantown disturbed him. Housing recovery in Atlanta was slow and many had to make do with what they could piece together.

Despite these challenges, Hunter writes that Shermantown was a “vibrant settlement” and “a haven for newly freed people in search of life in the city that would enhance their autonomy and allow them to escape the strictures of bondage” (241).

The numbers of Black washerwomen impressed Ingersoll. Most of them took in washing work because it was a domestic task that didn’t require them to serve in someone else’s home. They could maintain their own labor schedule. In 1879, the washerwomen organized to standardize their pay.

Today, “African Americans are disproportionately confined to inferior, overpriced housing, live near hazardous waste sites, and even lack clean drinking water in places like Flint, Michigan, Ingersoll’s home state” (243). These challenges have not stopped them from pursuing their dreams and enriching their lives.

Darity gives the history of John Wayne Niles, the son of a white man and a Black woman. He was a swindler and entrepreneur who “proposed a territorial reparations program under the aegis of his all-Black indemnity Party” (244). He wanted 6,000 square miles of land for a Black settlement. He petitioned for the land in 1883 but disappeared in 1884. Darity details several of Niles’s schemes, from selling liquor without a license to financial fraud in corn futures. There are no records of the time or manner of his death.

Niles was persuasive and charismatic. Darity writes, “Niles’s personal history had given his opponents plenty of ammunition, but implementation of his core idea—provision of land grants for the formerly enslaved—would have forever altered the trajectory of America’s racial and economic history” (247).

Christopher J. Perry was the founder of the Philadelphia Tribune. On its launch day, November 28, 1884, “he had no way of knowing that it would become the longest-running independent Black newspaper in the nation” (249). It had Black authors and a Black audience.

Between 1870 and 1890, Philadelphia’s Black population doubled. Police began profiling Black people, certain that the increasing numbers would lead to greater crime. Coercion was common in this surveillance state, and beatings accompanied most arrests.

In 1885, Annie Cutler shot and killed William Knight, a man who had broken up with her. She shot him after they passed on the street and he ignored her. A jury found her guilty, and the judge sentenced her to hang. Gross writes that a white woman would have received a lighter sentence. After a public outcry and diligent work from her attorney, her sentence was commuted to eight years. The Tribune followed the process in great detail, meticulously documenting the nuances of the case and the implications of the verdict for Black readers.

Kelley visits Keith Plessy, a descendent of Homer Plessy, the plaintiff who challenged Louisiana’s racial segregation laws in the landmark supreme court case Plessy v. Ferguson. That ruling enshrined the doctrine known as “separate but equal,” which was used as a legal justification for segregation under Jim Crow.

Keith tells Kelley that a Google search for Homer Plessy does not return a real picture of him. He believes that most Americans don’t have the proper understanding of his ancestor’s case: “The U.S. Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson served as the legal foundation for de jure racial segregation” (258). The doctrine of separate but equal would last for more than 50 years.

Kelley doubts the existence of a picture of Homer Plessy. In the 1890s, having a picture taken was an extravagant expense. It’s unlikely that the working-class Homer—he was a shoemaker—would have sat for a portrait.

Keith is a New Orleans activist who runs the Plessy and Ferguson Foundation, whose mission is to “increase public understanding of this historic case” (259). Homer Plessy deserves to have his story chronicled correctly so that people can draw the correct lessons from it.

Browne writes, “Black people will always find each other in the passage between death and America” (262). He uses the poem to describe the hardships America creates for its Black citizens and calls it a “country designed in an image of rot” (262).