In “Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619–2019,” editors Ibram Kendi and Keisha Blain have assembled an extraordinary chorus of voices that includes 90 writers, each of whom takes on a five-year period in the 400-year journey of African Americans from 1619 to the present.
On Feb. 4 at 5 p.m., join Kendi, a National Book Award winner and New York Times bestselling author, and Blain, an award-winning historian, editor and president of the African American Intellectual History Society, along with contributors Kyle Mays, UCLA assistant professor, and Martha Jones, Society of Black Alumni presidential professor and Johns Hopkins University professor of history, as they discuss this new book and the importance of community history.
To RSVP for this event, visit the California African American Museum website.
Mays is an assistant professor of African American studies, American Indian studies and history at UCLA. He is a transdisciplinary scholar of urban history and studies, Afro-Indigenous studies and contemporary popular culture. He teaches courses on Afro-Indigenous history, popular culture and urban studies. He works with students interested in comparative race and indigeneity, popular and expressive culture, and urban histories and contemporary experiences in the city. His forthcoming book “An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States” argues that African enslavement and Indigenous dispossession have been central to the founding of the United States, and explores how Black and Indigenous peoples have resisted U.S. democracy from the founding of the U.S. to the present.