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

“He was whipped in front of an assembled audience of Black and white Virginians, to show everyone what the punishment would be for “abusing himself to the dishonor of God and shame of Christians, by defiling his body in lying with a Negro.”

Hugh Davis receives a court-mandated punishment for having sex with a Black woman. Oluo believes this to be the first time that a man was punished for degrading—and possibly diluting, by siring a child with a Black woman—whiteness. Rather than speaking of his exploitation of her, the conversation focuses on how he defiled himself. Oluo traces this event to the white supremacy movement today.

“The United States was indeed built on chattel slavery, which deemed people of African descent inferior to white people and defined Black people as commodities to be bought, sold, insured, and willed. That was certainly evil. It was not, however, "necessary" or inevitable. The system of racialized slavery that is now seared into the American public consciousness took centuries to metastasize and mature.” 

Many scholars and historians describe slavery as a necessary step in America’s creation. They imply that the reward of having a country as rich and free as America was worth the terrible cost of slavery. This point of view abdicates responsibility for the evil of slavery and diminishes its impact on modern America. The racial injustices of today exist on a continuum, as an extension of systematic choices and policies, not because of an inevitable force.

“White Christian leaders made the double move of enshrining their bigotry in laws while simultaneously labeling the question of slavery as a ‘civil’ or ‘political’ issue outside the purview of the church. Not only did the religious, political, and economic establishment create policies to codify slavery and white supremacy, they also pushed these actions outside the realm of Christian ethics.” 

Christian leaders needed to have it both ways with slavery. They wanted the country to profit from slave labor but did not want to address the hypocrisy of promising equal spiritual liberty while denying actual physical freedom. By framing slavery as a political and civil issue, they could benefit from slavery and embed it more deeply with policies and laws, without debating its morality.

“It is nearly impossible to disconnect gun ownership and race in America. Gun ownership has always been a tool to secure power—racist white power.” 

Laws in colonial Virginia made it illegal for Black people to own guns, even to protect themselves. A Black person did not have the ability to defend themselves from a white person carrying a gun. Today, gun control laws are often aimed at Black gun owners and discussed in terms of urban crime. If most of the legislators are white, they can keep more Blacks Americans from having guns.

“It’s a truism that we see the past as far more distant than it is in reality.”

It can be tempting to view the evil of slavery of something that happened in another age. But it was only a couple hundred years ago in America. The effects of slavery are not thousands of years old but only a couple of centuries. Activists and students of history must be able to view slavery through a short-term perspective.

“So what is the sound of Black freedom? Perhaps it is best to begin by thinking reflexively about the probing question posited by W. E. B. Du Bois: ‘Do the sorrow songs sing true?’”

Du Bois’s question distills the Black experience into his answer. Currently, the sound of Black freedom has a sorrowful sound. This is because it is a truthful sound, and the song cannot yet be a full, celebratory, happy one. One day the sorrow songs may be relics; now, they are still relevant.

“After the Enlightenment, with the Divine no longer an acceptable basis for scientific evidence, European scientists pointed to nature as producing innate distinctions between races.” 

The Enlightenment created more people who were skeptical of religion. The appeal to Divinity no longer had the authority it once did when matters could be investigated scientifically. For European scientists who had a stake in perpetuating the institution of slavery, they turned to pseudoscience to test hypotheses that some races were inferior to others. Black people did not get to profit from the new knowledge of the Enlightenment; rather, they had this period of ostensibly freethinking and open mindedness turned against them.

“Though slavery officially ended after the Civil War, the Christianity that blessed white supremacy did not go away. It doubled down on the Lost Cause, endorsed racial terrorism during the Redemption era, blessed the leaders of Jim Crow, and continues to endorse racist policies as traditional values under the guise of a ‘religious right.’ As a Christian minister myself, I understand why, for my entire ministry, the number of people who choose not to affiliate with any religious tradition has doubled each decade. An increasingly diverse America is tired of the old slaveholder religion.” 

One of the greatest hypocrisies surrounding slavery is that American Christianity has been used to support it. The author writes that Black people are the most Christian demographic in America. However, Christianity as a white man’s religion is what he calls the old slaveholder religion. An institution that waffles on liberty in this life, with promises of spiritual liberty in the afterlife, is not a Christianity that the author can endorse. The old Christianity doesn’t serve Black people’s interests, writes George.

“I go to sleep every night with a bulb of cotton on the dresser next to my bed, not because I want to remember. I will always remember. But the cotton helps me imagine. It helps me wake up. It helps me fight. It helps me realize that there are millions of ways to win. But in this country, they’re all rooted in Black bodies, Black deaths, Black imaginations, Black families. And cotton.” 

Cotton is a mainstay of American life. The author did not live through slavery, but the constant presence of cotton reminds her that the struggle is not over. America’s greed for cotton, among other things, contributed to the greatest evil America has perpetrated.

“As much as by the superior military strength and numbers of the white opposing force, the possibility of Black liberation is often undermined by Black people who have been so successfully indoctrinated by white supremacist principles that the idea of mass Black freedom is threatening or, at worst, unimaginable.”

One of the most discouraging parts of Black progress is when it is thwarted by Black people. The Black people blamed for this are often close enough to white supremacy to benefit from the proximity. Tapping into someone else’s power is not legitimate power, but it is better than some Black people have been able to gain on their own.

“‘Men talk of the Negro problem. There is no Negro problem,’ Douglass declared in 1894, as the shadow of Jim Crow fell across the nation. ‘The problem is whether the American people have honesty enough, loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough to live up to their Constitution.’” 

Frederick Douglass often reminded the country of its hypocrisy. The Constitution cannot justify slavery. The slave state was anti-Constitution and anti-liberty. Douglass challenged the very notion of a slaveholder’s patriotism and honor.

“If they stake their lives for us they must be prompted by the strongest motive—even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept.”

Abraham Lincoln understood the motivation to fight for the North. If someone risks their life to fight for a cause, they care about it more than their own life. Lincoln knew that allowing Black soldiers to fight and die for the Union had to be honored with freedom. He would keep the promise, but postwar America made it clear that there was more to freedom than emancipation.

“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 author considers Black survival a heroic achievement. With survival itself being an achievement, it shows that there is nothing that Black Americans cannot achieve. If they fail, it will be due to apathy, a lack of unity, and a failure of organization.

“Desperate to control white women’s sexual behavior and maintain sexual control over Black women, Southern white men had created a scapegoat in the animalized figure of the Black rapist. Wells-Barnett argued that the focus and attention on the image of the Black rapist concealed lynching’s motives and masked violence against Black women who were victims of sexual assault and lynching.” 

Black men were demonized as rapists, even though most of the lynchings did not involve rape or even the accusation of rape. Wells-Barnett argues that Black men were an easy target for white southern men, who could use them as bogeymen, while indulging their own worst impulses, acting out sexually, violently, and dictatorially.

“What happens to the person when they become a symbol? Can they be recovered? Can they exist beyond what they embody?”

Jack Johnson’s identity was lost in the maneuvering of the boxing world. He became a symbol of Black versus white, and even though he won, his fame didn’t have anything to do with his qualities. Rather, he became the face of a struggle and the proof that a Black man could compete against white men in sports.

“The Fascist racketeers were no fools. They understood the psychology of their starving victims. Their appeal to them was irresistible. It went something like this: “Run the niggers back to the country where they came from—Africa! They steal the jobs away from us white men because they lower wages. Our motto is therefore: America for Americans!” 

Angelo Herndon understood the tactics the fascists used to appeal to hyper-nationalists. Kelley compares fascist propaganda to the rhetoric espoused by Donald Trump and his supporters. As long as African Americans could be seen as more African than American, it would be easy to turn so-called patriots against them.

“What kind of people are we that build prisons while closing treatment centers?” 

The so-called War on Drugs has seen massive casualties even as the drug market grows. Laws aimed at reducing drug-related crimes have targeted Black communities more than white. Policies resulting in lost opportunities have created incentives for Black people to get into criminal activity instead of honest labor. But America spends money on locking people up, even though data shows that treatment is the best option.

“The Hill hearings had betrayed a simple and tragic truth: If I were to come forward against this upwardly mobile, Ivy League-educated Black man, most Black people would not believe me.” 

Hill inspired the author with her courage, but her treatment was also a warning. Many Black people treated Anita Hill as a race traitor for accusing Clarence Thomas, which could have kept him from a position of power. She has to weigh the risk of her accusation against the backlash she will receive from her own community.

“Black women resisted by showing up in the story of their lives, by loving, learning, and leading—despite the systemic barriers and humiliations to make them small enough to practically disappear. But Black women did not disappear, and they will not disappear because we know something established power does not: we are something.”

The author’s essay focuses on an effect she calls depresencing. Depresencing causes Black women to disappear because they are not acknowledged. Hurricane Katrina provided a perfect example. Black women were neglected, and no one protected them. The author knows that they will endure. She will not allow them to disappear

“When it comes to our democracy, and who we determine to have the right to vote—our most sacred of rights—patience is no virtue. We must never be patient when someone else’s rights are in the balance.” 

Many so-called virtues only work in favor of people who are already privileged. Human rights cannot be postponed. Centuries of African American history have shown that waiting for someone else to bestow equality on African Americans is unproductive. Impatience is the master value when it comes to liberty for all Americans.

“Change does not happen without backlash—at least, any change worth having—and that backlash is an indicator that the change is so powerful that opposing forces resist that change with everything they have.” 

Garza sees the backlash to Black Lives Matter as proof that the movement is timely and necessary. Real change is often turbulent and violent. If the opponents of Black Lives Matter are willing to resist with everything they have, African Americans and supporters of Black Lives Matter must be willing to do the same.

“A looming question faces antiracist social movement in the United States: Will the backlash become a force powerful enough to prevail? Or will our organizing become stronger and sharper in the face of such backlash, assured that its presence alone has already declared our victory? Only time—and strategic organizing—will tell the next four hundred years of African America.”

Garza sees progress in the Black Lives Matter movement. However, one of the stories of Four Hundred Souls is that the movement requires organization and tenacity. Without a strategy and the will to persevere, the progress of modern movements can dwindle and regress. Garza is optimistic but knows that there is much work to do.

“There’s a saying that has circulated in Black communities for decades: ‘I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams.” 

The writer’s ancestors did not have the freedom that she does. They wouldn’t have dreamed that they could have as much as she. However, she is no longer sure that she is her ancestors’ wildest dreams. She is not enslaved, but she still faces many old problems.