 Ten Freedom Summers received widespread acclaim from critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, the album received a weighted average score of 99, based on 8 reviews. In The Guardian, Fordham called it "a landmark in jazz's rich canon", while Bill Shoemaker of The Wire deemed it "a monumental evocation of America's civil rights movement". Glen Hall of Exclaim! wrote that "Smith's music resonates with the suffering and the dreams of a better life that embodied the decade of 1954 to 1964 that is the subject of this powerful compendium of compositions." AllMusic's Thom Jurek viewed the box set as Smith's best work, writing that it "belongs in jazz's canonical lexicon with Duke Ellington's Black Brown & Beige and Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite." Phil Johnson from The Independent found the music very gratifying, comparing it to if Miles Davis had recorded Ligeti during the 1950s. Langhoff wrote in PopMatters that the set was "about sound: the tangible, physically beautiful sounds of Smith's imperative trumpet and of different instruments in combination, testing their own limits." He asserted in conclusion, "In four and a half hours, Wadada Leo Smith writes one of America's defining events in sound, and the story is all of ours." In Cadence Magazine, Rusch was less enthusiastic and felt the box set could have benefitted from being released as four separate albums, writing that listening to the record in its entirety was "exhausting, but also involving and inspiring".
