The story of Sally Hemings, the enslaved mistress of Thomas Jefferson, is told by her biographer, Annette Gordon-Reed, in the years 1789 to 1794, when the two were separated while Jefferson served as secretary of state. Provocatively, Kendi, Blain and publisher Chris Jackson - the visionary editor in chief of the One World imprint of Penguin Random House - use the five-year device to reframe well-worn narratives. Still other chapters examine subgroups that don’t fit conventional categories of Black heroism and victimhood: maroons who hid out in the Blue Ridge Mountains in the early 1700s Underground Railroad abolitionists who escaped slavery by “strategic passing” as White Black feminists of the 1970s Combahee River Collective who began to embrace “intersectionality” before that term became popular. Other essays recount Black rebellions that have been overshadowed by all the attention paid to Nat Turner and John Brown, including the New York City Revolt of 1712, the Stono River Rebellion of 1739 and the Louisiana Rebellion of 1811. Some identify milestones on a long road of legal dehumanization that began well before the War of Independence or the era of Jim Crow - from the 1667 Virginia Law on Baptism, excluding Blacks from rights otherwise granted to members of the church, to the 1705 Virginia Slave Codes, to the French Code Noir applied in the Louisiana Territory in 1724.

Washington and Zora Neale Hurston, there are dozens of mini-chapters on largely forgotten Black history. Along with short takes on well-known figures such as Frederick Douglass, Booker T.

Four Hundred Souls by Ibram X. Kendi