MixedLos Angeles Review of BooksRevives the memory of NAACP executive director Walter White, especially his advocacy to outlaw lynchings ... One of the biggest faults in Baime’s biography is his limited understanding of social class dynamics in Black America.
Howard W French
RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksOffers readers a broad historical context of modern contemporary African society in order to consider why we do not account for the significance of Africa and Africans in contemporary society ... French brilliantly employs his experiences traveling in Africa and the Americas as he researched this 500-year history. Through his travels, we see spaces most readers will never be able to traverse. His journalistic skill makes this narrative highly readable for generalists and specialists alike. This alone is an important contribution ... My primary critique is that French tends to rely too heavily on archival sources dominated by Europeans to tell an African history. There are plenty of other sources, including artistic renderings, rituals that anthropologists have discerned, and oral stories that tell us a great deal about the competing ideas between Africans themselves and with their European rivals ... Nevertheless a powerful offering, adding to a pantheon of important scholarship that black people have written regarding Africa’s history.
Ibram X Kendi and Keisha N. Blain
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.
