We knew how beautiful this book could be, and that’s what we focused on as we worked. Almost every stage in our editing process was daunting. These 90 writers are all extremely busy, and most have written entire books on the topics we asked them to address - the trans-Atlantic slave trade, intersectional feminism, queer sexuality, voter suppression, Black immigration, policing and incarceration, and much more.
Kendi: And assembling the group wasn’t easy. We knew their work, and through specific, detailed prompts, we were able to ask them to write about topics that would reveal their style and expertise. Once you teamed up, how did you go about selecting the writers who contributed? What challenges did the team face?īlain: We drafted a long list of gifted writers who we thought could evoke the complexities of Black history from different disciplinary perspectives. And I realized: “What if we brought together 80 different writers to write five years of African-American history each? What if we brought together 10 poets who could write poetry based on 40 years of African-American history each? What if this community of 90 writers would end up writing the history of a community?” When that idea came to me, I knew the project was going to be massive, and that there was only one person who could help me pull it off: Keisha Blain. But I didn’t think that writing another single-authored history book would be celebratory or innovative enough. I wanted to commemorate the symbolic birthday of Black Americans and what later came to be known as the United States. Kendi: Yes, and in 2018, the idea for “Four Hundred Souls” came. Before long, we were co-editing Black Perspectives and collaborating on op-eds. At that time, I was editing the blog Black Perspectives, and I wanted to bring in a scholar to contextualize protest in the long history of Black student activism. Blain: In 2015, there was a campus protest at the University of Missouri.
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