Of Blood and Sweat by Clyde W. Ford
Since its colonial beginnings, America has built and expanded its institutions of wealth and power: with wealth, first rooted in agriculture, comes power in fields such as politics and culture. That agricultural wealth, however, was created by Black people. White people reflexively used their power stemming from Black labor to establish means of controlling their wealth and power sources.
Clyde W. Ford uses the lives of Black individuals throughout history as a lens to explore their role in creating these institutions in the highly anticipated Of Blood and Sweat: Black Lives and the Making of White Power and Wealth (Amistad; April 5, 2022).
Ford digs from pre-colonial Africa through post-Civil War America to reveal in accessible, thorough and engrossing language that when tracing the history of almost any major American institution of power and wealth you’ll find it was created by Black Americans or created to control them — and how they currently affect Black Americans decades and centuries later.
“Without slavery, the Founders would not have been able to pontificate on the lofty ideals of freedom that made their way into documents like the Declaration, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights,” Ford writes. “They would have been so tied to their land, growing their crops, mostly tobacco, that they simply would not have had time for anything else … Thus, freedom in early America was a privilege that derived from slavery.”
In this provocative, timely and painstakingly researched book, the award-winning author of Think Black tells the story of how Black labor helped to create and sustain the wealth of the white one percent throughout American history.
Meticulously researched and documented, Of Blood and Sweat is a compelling look at the past that holds broad implications for present-day calls for racial equity, racial justice and the abolishment of systemic racism, and offers invaluable insight into our understanding of Black history and the story of America.
