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Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America

An Evening with Ibram Kendi and Keisha N. Blain

In celebration of Black History Month, the Library is thrilled to welcome Dr. Ibram Kendi and Dr. Keisha N. Blain for a discussion about their book "Four Hundred Souls."

This Black History Month, DC Public Library is celebrating the multi-faceted Black experience with "This Is My Story," lifting up Black creativity, celebrating Black joy, honoring Black innovation and saluting Black activism. As a part of this celebration, the Library is thrilled to welcome Dr. Ibram Kendi and Dr. Keisha N. Blain for a virtual conversation about their book, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619 - 2019. Let us know you will be joining us by registering for this event! To tune in click the link below or follow us on Facebook to watch on Facebook Live.

About Four Hundred Souls

In late 2018, one year before our nation approached the four-hundred-year mark of captive Africans landing in Virginia, National Book Award winner and #1 New York Times bestselling author Dr. Ibram X. Kendi knew that he wanted to try to both capture that long and complex history and highlight some of the best recorders of Black history and experience writing at that moment. He teamed up with Dr. Keisha N. Blain, award-winning historian, editor, and president of the African American Intellectual History Society, and together, they assembled a community of eighty Black writers and ten Black poets. The result is FOUR HUNDRED SOULS: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 (One World, available in paperback February 1, 2022), a choral history that details both well-known and largely forgotten moments of history; together, they paint a picture of the varied perspectives that have always defined Black America. 

Throughout FOUR HUNDRED SOULS, each of the eighty writers—a remarkable sampling of historians, journalists, activists, philosophers, novelists, political analysts, lawyers, anthropologists, curators, theologians, sociologists, essayists, economists, educators, and cultural critics—chronicles a five- year span, with ten poets recapturing these periods in verse, to cover the 400 years. The volume’s first writer, Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of the 1619 Project, journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, covers August 20, 1619, which marks the first recorded arrival of “some 20 and odd Negros,” to August 19, 1624. The volume’s final writer, Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza, covers August 20, 2014 to August 20, 2019. Hannah-Jones’ retelling of the genesis of African America and Garza’s urgent insights into what it means to be Black in America today bookend the passages, each of which revolve around a specific person, place, idea, or event.

Speaker Biographies

Dr. Ibram X. Kendi

Dr. Ibram X. Kendi is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University and the founding director of the BU Center for Antiracist Research. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a CBS News racial justice contributor. He is the host of the new action podcast Be Antiracist. Dr. Kendi is the author of many highly acclaimed books including Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, making him the youngest-ever winner of that award. He has also produced five straight #1 New York Times bestsellers, including How to Be an Antiracist, Antiracist Baby, and Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, co-authored by Jason Reynolds. In 2020, Time magazine named Dr. Kendi one of the 100 most influential people in the world. He was awarded a 2021 MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as the Genius Grant. He will publish How To Raise an Antiracist on June 14, 2022. 

Dr. Keisha N. Blain

Dr. Keisha N. Blain, a 2022 National Fellow at New America, is an award-winning historian and writer with broad interests in 20th century United States, African American History, the modern African Diaspora, and Women’s and Gender Studies. She is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh and a columnist for MSNBC. She is currently in residence at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University and a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study.

Blain has published extensively on race, gender, and politics in both national and global perspectives. She is the author of the multi-prize-winning book Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (2018) and co-editor of To Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism (University of Illinois Press, 2019); New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition (Northwestern University Press, 2018); and Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism, and Racial Violence (University of Georgia Press, 2016).

Her latest books are the #1 New York Times Best Seller Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019, edited with Ibram X. Kendi (Penguin Random House/One World, 2021); and Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer's 

Enduring Message to America (Beacon Press, October 5, 2021). Follow her on Twitter @KeishaBlain and on Instagram @KeishaNBlain.

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