by L. Patterson (Author)
The First 400 illuminates the reality that debt peonage, convict leasing, sharecropping, and militarized policing were the spawns of antebellum slavery proving that the gist of this heinous practice has a shelf life which extends much further than Emancipation. From the account of possibly the first black autistic savant, an exploited blind musical genius and composer compared to Mozart and Beethoven who played at the White House and who Mark Twain dubbed an "archangel", to the runaway slave girl who spent seven years in a crawl space in her grandmother's attic to evade re-enslavement and ensure the safety of her children, The First 400 both laments a host of tragedies while serving to chronicle numerous heart felt triumphs. It also chronicles much of the relationship between America's long time love affair with racial bigotry and that cancer's undeniable influence and control over U.S. political policy and a caustic and suppressive social order.