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Ibram X. Kendi Profile picture
@ibramxk
Sep 14, 2020 • 9 tweets • 6 min read • Read on X
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I’m pleased to unveil the astonishing cover of FOUR HUNDRED SOULS: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019, which I edited alongside the award-winning historian @KeishaBlain. This historic volume is coming out @OneWorldLit on Feb. 2, 2021. 1/9
penguinrandomhouse.com/books/624334/f…
Histories of Black America have almost always been written by individuals, usually men. But why not a community of writers chronicling the history of a community? 2/9
penguinrandomhouse.com/books/624334/f…
@KeishaBlain and I assembled a community of 80 writers and 10 poets who represented some of the best Black recorders of Black America at its four-hundred-year mark. Though the project was conceived in 2018, most of the pieces were written in 2019. 3/9
penguinrandomhouse.com/books/624334/f…
We wanted the community to be writing during the four hundredth year in 2019. We wanted FOUR HUNDRED SOULS to write history and be history, a diary entry in the history of letters when Black America symbolically turned four hundred years old. 4/9
penguinrandomhouse.com/books/624334/f…
In different ways and forms, eighty writers each chronicled five years of African America’s history in succession, amounting to four hundred years. Each of the writers related that history, those years, to our time. 5/9
penguinrandomhouse.com/books/624334/f…
The volume’s first writer, Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of the 1619 Project @nhannahjones writes from Aug. 20, 1619 to Aug. 19, 1624. The volume’s final writer, Black Lives Matter co-founder @aliciagarza writes from Aug. 20, 2014 to August 19, 2019. 6/9
penguinrandomhouse.com/books/624334/f…
All 90 contributors are leaders in their fields. I can't wait to introduce them to you. The lineup is beyond belief. 7/9
penguinrandomhouse.com/books/624334/f…
FOUR HUNDRED SOULS has ten sections, each spanning forty years. Each section concludes with a poem. Sometimes history is best captured by poets—as these ten Black poets show. Indeed, the lives of Black Americans have been nothing short of poetic. 8/9
penguinrandomhouse.com/books/624334/f…
I can’t tell you how excited I am to get this volume in your hands. I wish 2/2/21 was tomorrow. But you can certainly pre-order today. #FourHundredSouls 9/9

penguinrandomhouse.com/books/624334/f…

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More from @ibramxk

Ibram X. Kendi Profile picture
Aug 3
African Americans are descendants of enslaved Africans in the U.S. Black Americans encompass African Americans and Black immigrants and their American-born descendants from Jamaican Americans to Nigerian Americans. Some African Americans have joined with racist White Americans like Trump to attack immigrants. I don’t think those African Americans realize that racist White Americans have historically seen us as. . .immigrants.

A thread 🧵
Most U.S. presidents from Thomas Jefferson to Abraham Lincoln supported deporting *free* African Americans out of the United States, as if we were immigrants. This policy plan was known as “colonization” in the 19th century. The American Colonization Society, which lobbied for this mass deportation of African Americans, was larger and more powerful and better funded than any abolitionist society.
During the Civil War, President Lincoln welcomed a delegation of African American men to the White House and asked them to support his mass deportation plan that had been funded by Congress. Lincoln’s successor, Pres. Andrew Johnson, claimed African Americans “are strangers to and unfamiliar with our institutions and our laws” in his his veto of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which granted African Americans birthright citizenship and some limited civil rights. Johnson thought African Americans “should pass through a certain probation, at the end of which, before attaining the coveted prize, they must give evidence of their fitness to receive and to exercise the rights of citizens.”
Read 10 tweets
Ibram X. Kendi Profile picture
Dec 29, 2023
If the SCOTUS refuses to disqualify Donald Trump from running for POTUS after leading an insurrection on January 6, 2021, then it will be the latest indication that the Confederates lost the military battles but won the legal war. 1/4 Image
The 14th Amendment, adopted in 1868, disqualifies from holding office former government officials who engaged in an insurrection against the U.S. 2/4
But as a neo-Confederate declared around that time during the war against Reconstruction, the 14th and 15th Amendments “may stand forever; but we intend. . .to make them dead letters.” 3/4
Read 4 tweets
Ibram X. Kendi Profile picture
Sep 6, 2023
The 13th Amendment allowed slavery to continue "as a punishment for crime." #OTD in 1913, prison officers forced 12 Black men into a tiny cell for not picking cotton fast enough on a state-run prison plantation in Richmond, Texas. Eight died because they couldn't breathe. A 🧵1/ Image
Since the 13th Amendment allowed slavery “whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,” prison farms became the new plantations to violently exploit Black labor. In 1910, almost 100% of the population on these Texas plantations were Black when 17.7% of Texans were Black. 2/ Image
Prison plantations were a lucrative state-owned and operated business. By 1910, the majority of profits generated by the Texas prison system were from these plantations. However, they came under fire from reformers who found higher levels of abuse compared to other prisons. 3/ Image
Read 11 tweets
Ibram X. Kendi Profile picture
Aug 12, 2023
The racist violence of the past is ever present in the racial makeup of numerous towns across the US. On this day in 1903, after failing to lynch a Black man, a racist White mob forced the Black residents to flee Whitesboro, Texas. Today this town is less than 1% Black. A 🧵 1/ Image
The history of many US towns is the history of the violent expulsion of Native peoples and later Black residents. Whitesboro is named after Ambrose White who fought in the Black Hawk War in 1832, when Sauk, Fox, and Kickapoo people crossed into Illinois to reclaim their land. 2/ Image
Between 1882 and 1942, around 700 people were lynched in Texas. In 1901, someone accused Abe Wilder of assaulting a White woman in Whitesboro. Racist White terrorists kidnapped Wilber. Then, a racist mob of 1,500 White people watched Wilder be tortured and set on fire. 3/ Image
Read 10 tweets
Ibram X. Kendi Profile picture
Jul 28, 2023
The litigants, who have falsely framed #affirmativeaction as anti-Asian before the Supreme Court, have been silent about—or supportive of—a real anti-Asian threat in the United States: laws prohibiting Asian nationals from owning U.S. land. 1/ Image
Nearly half of U.S. states—24 to be exact—have passed or proposed bills that would bar people of several nationalities, particularly Chinese people, from purchasing land. Some laws apply only to land near certain military installations; others ban purchases outright. 2/ Image
The DOJ recently blocked Florida's SB-264, which would've gone into effect on July 1. The bill would restrict nationals from several "foreign countries of concern" from purchasing land. But the harshest restrictions were placed on Chinese nationals. 3/

https://t.co/vSnfMgwOjDnbcnews.com/politics/polit…
Image
Read 10 tweets
Ibram X. Kendi Profile picture
Jul 25, 2023
#OTD in 1898, the US launched its invasion of Puerto Rico as part of the Spanish-American War. Ostensibly begun to help the Puerto Rican people throw off Spanish colonialism, the United States replaced Spain as colonizers. Puerto Rico remains a U.S. colony 125 years later. A 🧵1/ Image
The Spanish-American War was an outgrowth of Cuba's war of independence against Spanish rule. U.S. economic interests, as well as "yellow journalism" that inflamed public sentiment toward Spain's wartime conduct, compelled the US to declare war on Spain on April 25, 1898. 2/ Image
Even before the war, U.S. imperialists had their eyes set on Puerto Rico. As US Secretary of State James Blaine wrote in 1891, "There are only three places that are of value enough to be taken, that are not continental. One is Hawaii and the others are Cuba and Porto Rico.” 3/ Image
Read 6 tweets

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