RaveLos Angeles Review of Books... an inspiring book of historical observations, poetry, scholarship, and vignettes ... For me, what is exciting about Four Hundred Souls are the voices of scholars who, with their own rich and diverse Black experiences, use their journalistic, literary, and scholarly muscle to inform a wider public about the continuous historical struggles of their kith and kin in shaping the United States. Surely historian Carter G. Woodson, one of the founding organizers of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915, and his generational cohort are smiling down at this book. All of the essays in Four Hundred Souls are powerful and beautifully succinct ... All of the poets in the volume lift this history into song ... This superbly edited book comes right on time in this unenlightened moment in US history and serves as a reminder of a different set of democrats who have creatively turned 400 years of painful, uplifting ugliness into beautiful Blackness, inspiring histories of lifelong democratic struggle to be an unshackled people. If I were a teenager today, I would carry it in my backpack.
