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

Book by Karine Jean-Pierre · 7 quotes · African Americans, Blacks, Slavery

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

“Today, as in colonial Virginia, the wealthy and powerful maintain an unequal society with the complicity of white people who share color with them but class with almost everybody else.... Though my view of Bacon's Rebellion has changed over the years, I keep coming back to it. There's something vexingly American in the story, in the violence and in the hope--and in the lengths that the powerful will go to try to stop the most natural yearnings of all, for human connection and for freedom.”

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“Barack Obama had cobbled together a mighty coalition of people young and old, Black and white. The diversity of the coalition that backed him demonstrated the future he sought, one where people of all backgrounds would come together and push our great nation forward. The power of that thought, the audacity of his imagination to dream of what a better, more inclusive country might look like, frightened many who saw their lives dependent on the continuation of a racial hierarchy.”

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“Looking back on the past four hundred years, this nation's story of racism can seem almost inevitable. But it didn't have to be this way. At critical turning points throughout history, people made deliberate choices to construct and reinforce a racist America. Our generation has the opportunity to make different choices, ones that lead to greater human dignity and justice, but only if we pay heed to our history and respond with the truth and courage that confronting racism requires.”

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“Between the tenets of those two men [W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington], a race strived to untangle its convoluted root, urged its whole self forward, and hurtled toward the door America had fought so hard to keep closed.”

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“Benjamin Franklin, one of the most revered intellectuals of his day, was instrumental in importing Enlightenment thinking to the British colonies in North America. There, Enlightenment scientists' understanding of race served a critical political function: the view that nature had created racial distinctions resolved the contradiction between the Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality, and tolerance and the enslavement of African people. The shift to secular thinking reinforced the view that Black people were innately and immutably inferior as a race and therefore were subject to permanent enslavement. After chattel slavery ended, the biological concept of race continued to shape the social and biological sciences, medical practice, and social policies, forming a scientific foundation for eugenics, Jim Crow, and post-civil rights color-blind ideology that ignores racism's persistent impact.”

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“This "cargo," this group of twenty to thirty Angolans, sold from the deck of the White Lion by criminal English marauders in exchange for food and supplies, was also foundational to the American story. But while every American child learns about the Mayflower, virtually no American child learns about the White Lion. And yet the story of the White Lion is classically American. It is a harrowing tale--one filled with all the things that this country would rather not remember, a taint on a nation that believes above all else in its exceptionality. The Adams and Eves of Black America did not arrive here in search of freedom or a better life. They had been captured and stolen, forced onto a ship, shackled, writhing in filth as they suffered and starved. Some 40 percent of the Angolans who boarded that ghastly vessel did not make it across the Middle Passage. They embarked not as people but as property, sold to white colonists who were just beginning to birth democracy for themselves, commencing a four-hundred-year struggle between the two opposing ideas foundational to America. And so the White Lion has been relegated to what Bennett called the "back alley of American history." There are no annual classroom commemorations of that moment in August 1619. No children dress up as its occupants or perform classroom skits. No holiday honors it. The White Lion and the people on that ship have been expunged from our collective memory. This omission is intentional: when we are creating a shared history, what we remember is just as revelatory as what we forget.”

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