This has been a grueling, thrilling, and rewarding process, working closely with Professor Blain to make history and compose history by bringing together ninety Black writers. I want to thank each and every writer and poet for taking some time out of their busy schedules to contribute a piece. Not just any kind of piece. Moving and informative and relevant pieces and poems that were almost meant to be together. I don’t see this as my book, or Professor Blain’s book, or our book, but your book. The community’s book. The book of the community of writers, and the deceased and living community we are writing for. I want to thank you for sharing with the world and with history a sense of this community.
I must thank the incomparable literary agent who loved this book on first sight of the idea. Thank you, Ayesha Pande, for instantly seeing our vision for this book, for paving the way for the dream to once again become a beautiful reality that stands time’s test.
And we knew it would take a special editor to seamlessly edit fiction, nonfiction, and poetry—to fuse so many distinctive writing voices into one voice and many voices simultaneously. Editing a single writer is hardly easy. Try editing ninety writers and two editors for a single volume. Try editing a sweeping history of four hundred years. I don’t know how Chris Jackson pulled it off, but for history’s sake, I’m so glad that he did. Thank you, as always, Chris, for your greatness as an editor.
To the entire team at One World, especially Maria Braeckel, Nicole Counts, Stacey Stein, and Ayelet Gruenspecht, you know I’m forever grateful for your wisdom, your grace, your hard work, your determination to ensure every human being is reading this history, this community history.
To my partner, Sadiqa, and my daughter, Imani, thank you for being the rock and north star and loves of my existence. To my parents, Larry and Carol, and second parents, Nyota and B.T.; to my brother, Akil, and second brother, Macharia—thank you for your love. To all my family and friends, I learn love from you each day, and I strive to love you each day—as I do the Black community, as I do the American community, as I do the human community.
When we were putting the finishing touches on this book in the spring and summer of 2020, the human community, the American community, and especially the Black American community were facing one of the deadliest pandemics humanity has ever known. Between 9 April 2020, when states started releasing racial demographic data of coronavirus patients, and October, Black people have consistently died at more than twice the rate of white people from COVID-19. I want to acknowledge the already forty thousand Black lives lost, many of whom would still be with us if not for racism. You will never be forgotten. Your souls will always be cherished. This book is dedicated to you.
—Ibram X. Kendi, October 2020
NOTES
A Community of Souls
“A muster roll”: Thomas C. Holt, Children of Fire: A History of African Americans (New York: Hill and Wang, 2011), 3.
“a Dutch man”: John Rolfe to Sir Edwin Sandys, January 1619/1620, Encyclopedia Virginia, www.encyclopediavirginia.org.
1619–1624: Arrival
sixty-six grueling days: “Mayflower and Mayflower Compact,” Plimoth Patuxet, www.plimoth.org/learn/just-kids/homework-help/mayflower-and-mayflower-compact.
its 102 passengers: Patricia Scott Deetz and James F. Deetz, “Passengers on the Mayflower: Ages & Occupations, Origins & Connections,” Plymouth Colony Archive Project (2000), www.histarch.illinois.edu/plymouth/Maysource.html.
We know all their names: “Find Your Mayflower Ancestors,” American Ancestors, New England Historic Genealogical Society, mayflower.americanancestors.org/pilgrim-database.
“one of the most”: Rebecca Beatrice Brooks, “History of the Mayflower Ship,” History of Massachusetts, August 12, 2011, historyofmassachusetts.org/the-mayflower/.
“20 and odd”: Beth Austin, “1619: Virginia’s First Africans,” Hampton History Museum, December 2018, 9.
“No one sensed”: Lerone Bennett, Jr., Before the Mayflower: A History of the Negro in America, 1619–1964 (1962; New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 29.
Some 40 percent: Austin, “1619,” 8.
“back alley”: Bennett, Before the Mayflower, 87.
“It is indeed extremely”: W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (1935; New York: Russell & Russell, 1956), 711, 714.
“This, for the purpose”: Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” July 5, 1852, Teaching American History, teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/what-to-the-slave-is-the-fourth-of-july/.
“Your country?”: W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 128.
“Nations reel and stagger”: Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 714.
1629–1634: Whipped for Lying with a Black Woman
“abusing himself”: William Waller Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature in the Year 1619 (New York, 1823), 1:146.
Africans as heathens: Paul Lovejoy, “The Abolition of the Slave Trade,” New York Public Library, abolition.nypl.org/print/us_slave_trade/.
when another white man: Crandall Shifflett, “The Practise of Slavery,” Virtual Jamestown, www.virtualjamestown.org/praclink.html.
1634–1639: Tobacco
a woman running away: Lerone Bennett, Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America, 8th ed. (Chicago: Johnson Publishing Co., 1987), 36.
The lie is that the Africans: On gender and slavery, see Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in the Making of New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). For a broad overview of slavery in the United States, see Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998).
1639–1644: Black Women’s Labor
Neither white nor Indigenous women: Indigenous female servants above the age of sixteen became tithables in 1658. “Tithables: Everything You Wanted to Know,” Bob’s Genealogy Filing Cabinet: Southern and Colonial Genealogies, genfiles.com/articles/tithables.