John Burl Smith

The 4ooth: From Slavery to Hip Hop John Burl Smith

Reading The 400th: From Slavery to Hip Hop, readers follow the exciting but painful journey of the unending love story of a people who fell in love with being themselves. For readers to understand the true power of such a people and how they changed the world for Europeans, one must be reminded of the world that existed before slavery. So this story begins during the sixth century before the development of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. It progresses through the abolition of slavery in America to find the author's family's last known slave-Burl Lee. His son, Burl Lee, Jr., was the first Lee born out of slavery, then The 400th follows his line through the American Civil War, contraband life, the Reconstruction era, Plessy v. Ferguson (segregation), WWI, the Harlem Renaissance, Marcus Garvey, lynching and WWII to find the author in the 1940s. Along the way, slaves created the blues, dance, and Minstrelsy (blackface), which is the foundation of the American entertainment industry and culminated with the birth of Hip Hop - the highest development of Black Arts. The explanation of how all this happens is the story that fills the 950 pages of The 400th: From Slavery to Hip Hop.