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

After World War II ended, the Black Left wanted the postwar period to involve a reorganization of political and economic structures. Black manifestos envisioned a redistribution of wealth. Society disagreed, and mistrust of the left intensified.

The singer Paul Robeson was a communist and activist who opposed the Cold War. Whenever he had a chance, he argued that the real fight was at home against Jim Crow.

Several of Robeson’s concerts were canceled. At a Peekskill show, violent protesters canceled the show and destroyed property. During his rescheduled concert a week later at Peekskill, violence erupted. The United States was leaning to the right with accelerating speed. Many U.S. citizens celebrated the violence and urged others to learn from Peekskill’s lessons.

The author sees the Peekskill events as “hatred wrapped in the banner of patriotism; collusion of business interests, nativists, and racists; incitement by high officials and the media; and exaltation of violence as a redemptive force” (315). African Americans saw Peekskill as evidence of the steady growth of fascism and Jim Crow.

In 1948, as anti-Semitic Nazi war criminals were put on trial at Nuremberg, America was enforcing unjust stances against Black people. In Hearne, Texas, a battle over segregated schools showed “the contrast between the U.S. fight against Nazism abroad and its embrace of a rigid caste system at home” (317).

As a Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall helped challenge the policy of segregation. The result was Brown v. Board of Education, whose 1954 ruling made it illegal to segregate schools.

Prior to 1954, Black parents in Hearne had been petitioning for better school facilities for their children. Hearne’s leaders had planned on renovating dilapidated barracks after a Black school burned down. Black parents protested the unsafe conditions of the building and strategically withdrew their children from school.

Some U.S. officials were too hateful or frightened to enforce the government mandate of equal protection after Brown, but many were brave enough to uphold the ruling.

On May 17, 1954, in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education, segregation was now unconstitutional. The case inspired many artists. The writer James Baldwin criticized other Black writers—like Harriet Beecher Stowe and Richard Wright—for portraying a narrow view of the Black experience. He refused to apologize for the color of his skin, and “sought to claim the expansiveness he saw in Black history and culture” (322).

Black American artists “found common ground and purpose with Black artists abroad” (322) like Chinua Achebe, the author of the novel Things Fall Apart. Lorraine Hainsberry’s A Raisin in the Sun transformed theater as the first Broadway play authored by an African American.

The work of these artists “insisted that Black life was not mere endurance but a victory of spirit in the form of human complexity, imagination, resistance, breadth, and depth, precisely the resources that were essential for the coming revolutions” (324).

Cobb Jr. writes, “A critically important aspect of the freedom struggle that intensified in the 1960s was the convergence of young people with people the ages of their parents and grandparents who were willing to share their networks and experiences’ (325).

On February 1, 1960, workers at the Woolworth’s department store refused to serve four black youths, who then refused to leave. Their sit-in, and the many that followed, led to the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and strengthened the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). These organizations would be responsible for some of the most important civil rights activism of the coming years.

A massive upswing in youth activism resulted, leading to a predictable amount of backlash and violence. According to Cobb, the activism of the ‘50s and ‘60s paved the way for modern movements like Black Lives Matter.

Malcolm X was Joseph’s first exposure to Black Power. Appeared in the documentary Eyes On The Prize, Malcolm X’s “bold critique of white supremacy, Western colonialism, and anti-Black racial violence embodied the Black Power movement” (330). He asked that Blacks frame the struggle as a global fight for human rights and focused on Black pride and dignity. His message was sometimes at odds with that of the nonviolent Martin Luther King Jr., but they shared the same goals.

Malcolm X’s assassination on February 21, 1965 galvanized Black Americans to new levels of commitment and outrage. The assassination was a massive recruiting tool for Black Power.

A man named Stokely Carmichael became the next face of the Black Power movement. He broke his support for Martin Luther King Jr. and became a full-fledged radical. He invoked Black Power, saying, “the only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin’ us is to take over. What we gonna start saying now is Black Power!” (331). His words laid the foundation for the emergence of the Black Panthers, who would in turn lay the founding principles for many of the Black solidarity movements today.

Taylor examines the forms of housing discrimination that Black Americans have endured. After Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination on April 4, 1968, Congress passed legislation forbidding racial discrimination in the housing market. The court argued that housing discrimination was “‘redolent of slavery’ in its collective exclusion of African American from the benefits of freedom, including the right to move about in whichever way they saw fit” (335).

In August of 1968, Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Housing and Urban Development Act, which included the low-income housing initiative known as HUD. Despite these developments, real estate brokers and bankers were still able to constrain Black mobility and opportunity. They could take dilapidated properties, barely repair them, then sell them to Black families portrayed as “unsophisticated buyers” (337) who were at their mercy.

Since 2012, Black homeownership has declined, further widening the gap between white and Black homeownership. Taylor writes, “The continued American reliance upon the private sector as the main source of housing production has meant a continuation of the inequality that systematically disadvantages African Americans in search of home” (339).

In 1974, white citizens of Boston opposed desegregation with violence and fury. During the mid-1970s, they targeted Black lesbians and other female radicals, who then formed the Combahee River Collective. The Combahee River was where Harriet Tubman led a raid that freed 750 slaves.

The Collective comprised unpaid volunteers. The Combahee River Collective Statement made them famous; it “captured the voices and concerns of Black women and articulated the concept of simultaneous, interlocking oppressions, laying the groundwork for intersectionality” (342). Their statement also challenged homophobia. It is easy to see the Collective’s influence in many movements today.

Sebree’s poem describes the experience of listening to Abel Meeropoff’s song “Strange Fruit” (344). Popularized by Billie Holiday, “Strange Fruit” is a song about lynching; the strange fruit of the title refers to Black, lynched bodies dangling from nooses tied to the tree branches. She describes the song as being stuck in the groove of a record player, reminding the reader that the struggle of Black Americans continues and that:

We work to lift

our fists, the needle,

put on a new record to play (347).