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

In 1898, sports were segregated. Black players were banned from baseball by the 1903 World Series. There was little hope for progress on other athletic fronts. Then the boxer Jack Johnson became the “World Colored Heavyweight Champ. White fighters refused to face him for years, unwilling to risk their titles against a Black man and aware that they stood a good chance of losing. In 1908, Johnson beat Tommy Burns to win the official heavyweight title. In 1910, he beat the former champion, a white man named Jeffries. His victory led to “white rioting” that “resulted in the deaths of twenty-six Black people in incidents across the country” (272).

Johnson was the ultimate white nightmare when it came to a powerful, threatening Black man. But this characterization also robbed Johnson of depth, as few people wondered about the man inside the boxer. Bryant asks, “What happens to the person when they become a symbol? Can they be recovered? Can they exist beyond what they embody?” (273). Bryant believes that Johnson’s humanity still hasn’t been treated correctly or seriously.

Guy-Sheftall writes that America has always been reluctant to accept African American women intellectuals. Even an organization as ostensibly progressive as The American Negro Academy was completely male from 1897 to 1924. Its aims of elevating Black Americans and giving them new opportunities did not seem to need the support of women academics.

When the NAACP was founded in 1909, it was largely a male endeavor. Ida Wells-Barnett formed the Alpha Suffrage Club, the “first Black woman suffrage organization, committed to enhancing Black women’s civic profile by encouraging them to vote for and help elect Black candidates” (275).

Advances in Black freedom would not have been possible without the initiative and intellect of many women like Wells-Barnett. Downplaying or ignoring their achievements does a disservice to Black American history.

Twelve years after Plessy v. Ferguson, Black Americans “were now bearing the full weight of a racial caste system intended to resurrect the hierarchy of slavery and were living under the daily terror of its brutal enforcement” (278). The white supremacist propaganda film Birth of a Nation premiered in 1915, reviving the Ku Klux Klan and reigniting the worst aspects of Southern pride. Millions of Black Americans left the South. Ironically, they had to look for sanctuary in their own country, which had ostensibly fought a war to free them.

The South tried anything it could to keep people from leaving, including arresting people at train stations, or tearing up their tickets.

Riots began in Chicago on July 27, 1919 when the body of a Black 17-year-old Eugene Williams was found in a river. He’d drowned after being hit by a rock thrown by a white beachgoer. Nearly 40 people died during riots in what would be known as the Red Summer. However, nothing the Southerners did stopped The Great Migration, which was “the second big step the nation’s servant class ever took without asking” (281).

The effects of the 1919 Race Riot continued in Duster’s adult life. Chicago’s population increased by 148 percent during the Great Migration. People tried to confine Black Americans to thirty blocks called the Black Belt. One hundred years later, the population percentages are evenly distributed, but there are housing discrepancies: Black neighborhoods are more likely to experience indifference and a lack of infrastructure investment. Depending on the neighborhood, life expectancies in Chicago can differ by as much as 30 years.

Charles Johnson was the editor of Opportunity, a journal committed to fostering Black artists and intellectuals. He hosted the dinner that served as the debut party of the Harlem Renaissance. Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston were absent; they hadn’t moved to New York yet. James Baldwin was born in Harlem that summer.

Langston Hughes arrived in 1925 and quickly gathered a large following. Like many of the Harlem Renaissance artists, he found patrons in wealthy whites. His work, The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain was “[t]he aesthetic manifesto of a generation” (289). In Hughes’s analogy, a Black artist must scale the racial mountain to discover their true identity.

The writer Zora Neale Hurston armed herself and traveled through the South collecting folklore, which she released as the collection Mules and Men. Socially conscious novels gained greater influence. After the stock market crash, fewer white people—who owned most of the Harlem businesses—came to Harlem for pleasure, and poverty began to reassert itself.

When Angelo Herndon was 24, he was “one of the most famous Black men in America” (292). In many ways he was the opposite of most people in the Great Depression: He took action and found opportunities in the turmoil of America’s financial fallout.

He joined the Communist Party in 1930. He wanted to organize a group to fight societies like the Ku Klux Klan, and the Communist Party inspired him. On June 30, 1932, he marched on city hall with over a thousand others, forcing the city “to add $6,000 to local relief aid” (295). He was arrested days later and charged with being a Communist. Georgia had a rigid statute that could make insurrection a capital crime, and the prosecutor wanted the death penalty for Herndon.

A jury found Herndon guilty but did not request the death penalty. He went to prison and was released in October of 1934. He spent the next two years traveling across America, recruiting people to fight fascism. He said, “Fascism won’t stop anywhere—until we stop it” (295).

As a child, McFadden was required to speak proper English, but “Standard American English has never felt comfortable on my tongue” (297). She discovered Hurston in 1987 and loved the dialect. Hurston’s writing is often praised for its elegance, but McFadden knows that Hurston’s upbringing probably matters more than her formal writing education, in terms of her ability to convey dialect in writing.

Other Black authors accused Hurston of playing into stereotypes. Richard Wright wanted Black writers to go to war with the white establishment. He saw Hurston’s folksy portrayals of rural Black Americans as demeaning and antithetical to the cause of Black advancement.

Hurston’s writing gradually declined in popularity after her now-classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God was heavily criticized by contemporaries. However, McFadden celebrates her own bilingualism and credits Hurston’s courage and artistic authenticity for her healthy perspective. 

Smith’s poem references the famous lines from Booker T. Washington, “I am not quite sure of the exact place or exact date of my birth, but...I must have been born somewhere and at some time” (301). The poem states that these lines began “[a] whole people’s tumble into raw, untested century” (301).

The remainder of the poem cites various Black figures, including W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells-Barrett, and their quest to open “the door that America had fought so hard to keep closed” (301).