writing about insurrectionist Denmark Vesey, with Kanye West as a throughline Esther Armah on Black immigrants, and Barbara Smith on the Combahee River Collective, founded in 1974 by Black women who were “sick of being invisible.” Other notable contributors include Ijeoma Oluo, Annette Gordon-Reed, Donna Brazile, Imani Perry, Peniel Joseph, and Angela Y. Every voice in this “cabinet of curiosities’ is stellar, but standouts include Raquel Willis’ piece on queer sexuality (1814-1819) Robert Jones Jr. McFadden on Zora Neale Hurston, Salamishah Tillet on Anita Hill, and Kiese Laymon (“Cotton 1804-1809”) deftly tie the personal to the historical.
Board of Education, the Black Power movement, the war on drugs, Hurricane Katrina, voter suppression, and other staples of Black American history and experience. The brief but powerful essays in between feature lesser-known people, places, ideas, and events as well as fresh, closer looks at the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the Harlem Renaissance, Brown v. The book ends with Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza reflecting on the years between Aug. 20, 1619-the symbolic birthdate of African America when “twenty ‘Negroes’ stepped off the ship White Lion in Jamestown, Virginia”-to Aug. In the opening essay, Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer-winning creator of The 1619 Project, examines the period from Aug. This engrossing collection is divided into 10 parts, each covering 40 years, and each part ends with a poem that captures the essence of the preceding essays. In order to tell the story of Black America, acclaimed scholar Kendi and award-winning historian Blain bring together 80 Black “historians, journalists, activists, philosophers, novelists, political analysts, lawyers, anthropologists, curators, theologians, sociologists, essayists, economists, educators, and cultural critics” and 10 poets. A compendium of essays and poems chronicling 400 years of Black American history.
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