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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