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

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2021

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Part 8

Part 9

Part 10-Conclusion

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

Old Sources of Modern Racism

One recurring theme in Four Hundred Souls is the fatigue at struggling against the same problems. Slavery no longer exists in America, but the authors in the book demonstrate that racism and systematized racial oppression persist. Much of the current racism stems from policies, attitudes, and acts that took place centuries prior.

Emancipation ended slavery but gave rise to the Jim Crow era of the South. The fight against Jim Crow resulted in the Civil Rights movement, desegregation, and other great advances. But the attitudes that led to slavery, and which made Jim Crow possible, did not go away in light of new legislation. According to theories of racial caste held by Four Hundred Souls contributor Isabel Wilkerson, with each new reform—the end of slavery, desegregation—racism evolves in insidious ways to preserve the racial caste system in America. Most recently this occurred with the War on Drugs and mass incarceration, the outcomes of which disproportionate affect Black men. Moreover, each new racist innovation makes it easier for proponents of white supremacy to argue that these policies are race-neutral or “colorblind.” For example, the “separate but equal” doctrine was applied to paper over the fundamental racial inequities of segregation. Similarly, mass incarceration is defended as a race-neutral set of policies, even as police officers are shown to target Black communities, according to scholars like Michelle Alexander.

Many still see Christianity as a slaveholder religion, a view rooted in the changing of baptism laws. Black executions in which their killers don’t always face consequences continue.

Modern day African Americans still grapple with challenges that began with racist policies, laws, attitudes, governments, and religious hypocrisies that are centuries old at this point. Ideas persist through repetition and the passing down of traditions. Racism is an evil reality that will persist until it is stopped.

American Hypocrisy Concerning Equal Rights

the Constitution both pay lip service to equality across all facets of existence. However, the same nation simultaneously enslaved a huge piece of its population and defined them as less than human. Douglass’s speech about the 4th of July is perhaps the book’s most glaring condemnation of the gap between the nation’s purported foundation and its reality.

It is the same hypocrisy that hides the existence of the White Lion while celebrating the Mayflower. It is the same hypocrisy that allowed Christian leadership to tinker with baptism laws in order to restrict freedom and enforce slavery. Nothing is more hypocritical than proclaiming that “All men are created equal” (154) while subjecting so many men and women to the horrors of slavery.

This is why many refer to the Civil War and Reconstruction as a Second American Revolution, given that it was meant to enshrine the tenets of equal rights and freedom espoused in the Constitution for all Americans, not just white people. Yet the work of Reconstruction was left unfinished, paving the way for Jim Crow laws that once again deprived Black Americans of equal rights—to say nothing, by the way, of hypocrisy related to women’s inequality.

The Evolving Nature of the Black Struggle

Before emancipation, the only recourse for enslaved people who wanted to rebel was to escape or to revolt. Those who escaped were often caught. Militias always put down armed uprisings, and the resulting crackdowns on local enslaved people worsened their already poor living conditions.

Once emancipation occurred, the nature of the struggle evolved. Freedom did not look like the promised equality, and the Jim Crow era held its own horrors. The struggle evolved from an escape from literal physical captivity into the struggle to be treated as equals.

The civil rights movement gained Black Americans the right to vote and desegregation at heavy costs. Compared to what came before, these reforms looked like equality in terms of integrating society, but racism was tenacious.

The various Black liberation movements eventually coalesced under the umbrella of the pan-African movement. The struggle, as portrayed by Malcolm X and others, was a global fight for Black dignity.

Today, the struggle finds its most glaring examples of injustice in the fight for equal treatment from law enforcement. This is done through protests like those that emerged around the world in the wake of George Floyd’s murder; accountability in the courtroom against police officers who kill Black men and women without cause; and in the halls of state legislatures and the U.S. Congress, as laws are proposed concerning issues like qualified immunity.

Kendi writes that “There is no better word than we” (xvi). One of the reasons for choosing such disparate voices speaking about such a lengthy time frame is to show the sense of community that African Americans share. Racists divide the idea of Us and Them in a venomous way. African American solidarity is not divisive in the same way, and it has sometimes been their only source of support in a country that can work against them.

Four Hundred Souls shows many different African American groups, including the Black Panthers, the Nation of Islam, Black Christian America, the NAACP, the Combahee River Collective, and others. They sometimes differed in the methods preferred by their peer groups, but they all work within the same struggle.