Of blood and sweat Black lives and the making of White power and wealth

Novelist and psychotherapist Ford (Think Black) unearths in this fascinating history the inextricable links between America's "systems of power" and the horrors of slavery. From the arrival of enslaved Africans in 17th-century Virginia to the end of Reconstruction in 1877, Ford reveals how "Black lives created White wealth and power," and how African Americans have been met with "outright betrayal and brutality" when they asked for their fair share. He details how the slave trade spurred shipbuilding and other technological advancements, and notes that the modern-day stock and insurance markets were developed in Amsterdam, London, and other European capitals with ties to the slave trade. Ford also explains how enslaved laborers were essential to the tobacco and cotton industries in the U.S. and helped build the first railways in the South, and details how land redistributed to freed Blacks during the Civil War was returned to former slaveholders after President Lincoln's assassination. Throughout, Ford weaves in stories of resistance, noting, for instance, that a Black ship captain "helped foment the largest slave rebellion in South Carolina history"; explains complex financial instruments in lucid terms; and paints vivid scenes of Black life in the U.S. The result is an essential reckoning with the roots of the racial wealth gap in America. Adam Chromy, Movable Type Management. (Apr.)

Psychotherapist and novelist Ford (Think Black) presents a powerful and personal argument about the myriad ways Black labor created white wealth in the United States over the centuries. Ford uses the lives of specific Black men and women at pivotal moments--especially 1619, 1787, and the end of Reconstruction--to reveal the ongoing dynamics and interplay of freedom and unfreedom (especially slavery). Repeatedly, white men and women ignored opportunities to expand freedoms to Black Americans; instead, white Americans locked in their own economic, racial, and political power through constitutions, laws, contracts, and capitalist instruments. Ford argues the result was that Black men and women were unable to acquire property, secure liberty, and participate in virtually every aspect of American economic growth and development. He also explores the exploitation of Black labor and creativity and the racist foundations in banking practices, land policy, commodity exchanges, credit arrangements, and more. Ford also makes his subject personal by interweaving his own life experiences into the narrative. VERDICT Ford's forceful arguments and writing will compel readers to face the facts of the long history of exploitation and appropriation that have defined so much of America's struggle with itself to give substance and meaning to its promise of "freedom" for all.--Randall M. Miller

Humanities scholar Ford looks at the myriad--and uncompensated--contributions African Americans have made to the economies and cultures of the U.S. and beyond. The author opens with a little-known court case from Colonial Virginia wherein an indentured Black man sued not just for release from his expired contract, but also for "freedom dues." Perhaps surprisingly, the court ruled in his favor, voicing "a belief that power and wealth created from the labor of others entitled those who helped create that power and wealth to their fair share." Unfortunately, the enslaved far outnumbered the indentured and were accorded no such entitlement. As Ford observes, the slave trade by its very nature had ripple effects that enriched societies such as early modern Holland, whose banks financed shipbuilding. For their part, the enslaved afforded not just labor, building such infrastructure as the water system that still fuels Washington, D.C., and, of course, the entire agricultural economy of the American South. Their lack of liberty afforded their owners freedom: If not for the labor of the enslaved, the White farmers of the Colonial South could never have mounted a revolution against Britain--a revolution that helped shore up slavery. Ford writes of the lives of the first enslaved people to arrive in British North America, turning up little-known episodes and figures in American history--e.g., the multiracial Melungeon people of Appalachia and the celebration among Black residents of upstate New York of Emancipation Day: not June 19, Juneteenth, but instead Aug. 1, when slavery was outlawed in the British Empire in 1834, "freeing some 800,000 men and women in the West Indies, South Africa, and Canada." The book teems with ideas, sometimes in an onrushing embarrassment of riches, and often repeats the inarguable idea that as makers of much of the modern world's wealth, Black people continue to deserve a share. A compelling argument for long-overdue reparations--though much more than that alone. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.