When I came home from work on
February 1st, the first day of Black History Month, I found a package at my front
door. I didn’t place any recent orders and was not expecting anything, so it
was a surprise.
Upon opening the box, with some anticipatory excitement, I saw that this was a gift from a dear friend. It was the book Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African American, 1619-2019, edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain. I had read about this book and watched some book promotional interviews with Dr. Kendi so was eager to check it out when it published. Now, here it was on my table on the day of its publication.
The book it divided into ten sections each covering a forty year span of time with a different author writing a brief essay on something significant during each five year period. Each section then concludes with a poem summarizing the themes of that era.
Eighty authors and ten poets then comprise the writing of this volume. And as Dr. Kendi explained in one of his interviews, so much of history is written from the perspective of one man. One man simply cannot tell the story of such a diverse people. The essayists in Four Hundred Souls represent a diverse array of professions, geography, and perspectives. They give us a new way of telling the story of our past.
Last weekend I read the first section in Four Hundred Souls. I grieved the past did not know and was never taught in school. I was glad to learn about these first forty years of African American history, notably starting one year before the famed 1620 and the Mayflower with instead 1619 and the White Lion.
I look forward to reading the rest of Four Hundred Souls for its storytelling of so much that has not been told in our singular voice his-story history. It is refreshing to read from a choir of voices gathered for this collective.
I hope and pray that this Black History month is the beginning of a renewal that continues forever and ever. We need to put aside calendrical tokenism and embrace the truth that Black history, indigenous history, and all the rest are undeniably and inextricably American history. We cannot talk about the Mayflower without first confronting the awful truth of the White Lion. And so on from there.
A recent meme I saw on Facebook reads: White supremacy won’t die until white people see it as a white issue they need to solve rather than a Black issue they need to empathize with.
For too long too many have seen white supremacy as limited to the KKK, Jim Crow, and the awful events that happened in Charlottesville in 2017. But white supremacy is much more subtle than these overt expressions. It is not telling the story of the White Lion in schools when I was a kid. It is seeing white as the norm and everything else as different, an other. It is a system of policies and a caste structure that is the air we breathe, the water we swim in, and the culture we absorb from the youngest of ages.
Dr. Kendi concludes his introduction to Four Hundred Souls: “I don’t know how the community has survived—and at time thrived—as much as is has been deprived for four hundred years. The history of Black America has been almost spiritual. Striving to survive death that is racism. Living through death like spirits. Forging a soulful history. A history full of souls. A soul for each year of history. Four Hundred Souls.
As people of faith we are bound up and together by the waters of baptism that unite us across every form of division that we construct by God whose face is manifest in every person we meet.
Kendi and Blain have given us a template in Four Hundred Souls for a new way of telling the stories of the past with a choir of voices that we may know them anew today. May we hear them as part of our collective and shared past and not as something set apart for a special month. May this soulful history help us recognize and dismantle the white supremacy that has persisted for four hundred years too long.
Peace,
Pastor Robert
