African American Workers Built America.

Historians today say “yes.” But free men and women would have built it better and made it richer.

American capitalism was built on the backs of slaves and the slave economy — and not just in the South. Some of these practices are still with us.

Historian Calvin Schermerhorn explains how slavery built America without returning virtually any of the gains to the enslaved people — or their descendants. He also describes how racial inequality is part of our national DNA and why it persists.

Schermerhorn is a professor of history in ASU’s School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies, and the author of four books on the history of slavery in the U.S., including “Unrequited Toil: A History of United States Slavery.

Four hundred years ago, “about the latter end of August,” an English pirate ship called the White Lion landed at Point Comfort in the Virginia Colony carrying “not anything but 20 and odd Negroes,” wrote colonist John Rolfe. Though this is often viewed as the starting point of slavery in what would become the United States, the anniversary is somewhat misleading.

Africans, both enslaved and free, had lived in St. Augustine, in Spanish Florida, since the 1560s, and since slavery was not legally sanctioned in Virginia until the 1640s, early arrivals would have occupied a status closer to indentured servants. But those ambiguities only point to how essential people of African descent were to the establishment and development of the imperial outposts that became the United States.

It was their work, as much anyone else’s, that helped build the world we live in today.

In his new book, Workers on Arrival, the historian Joe William Trotter Jr. shows that the history of black labor in the United States is thus essential not only to understanding American racism but also to “any discussion of the nation’s productivity, politics, and the future of work in today’s global economy.”

At a time when mainstream political rhetoric and analysis related to economic change still tend to center on white men displaced by job loss in manufacturing and mining, similar challenges faced by black workers are often examined through a distinct lens of racial inequality.

As a result, Trotter contends, white workers are viewed as the victims of “cultural elites and coddled minorities,” while African American workers suffering from the very same economic and political conditions are treated as “consumers rather than producers, as takers rather than givers, and as liabilities rather than assets.”

Reminding us that Africans were brought to the Americas “specifically for their labor” and that their descendants remain “the most exploited and unequal component of the emerging modern capitalist labor force,” Workers on Arrival provides an eloquent and essential correction to contemporary discussions of the American working class.

Trotter acknowledges that he is not the first to offer this critique and cites generously from “nearly a century of research” and prominent African American scholars in order to demonstrate “the centrality of the African American working class to an understanding of U.S. history.”

These include W.E.B. Du Bois’s studies of black working-class communities in Philadelphia, Memphis, and other cities during the turn of the 20th century, as well as Sterling Spero and Abram L. Harris’s 1931 book The Black Worker. But Trotter’s achievement is to synthesize this rich body of historical scholarship into a single volume written with an eye to a general audience.

Trotter’s analysis adds to this scholarship as well: While emphasizing the breadth of black workers’ contributions to economic development and growth, he is particularly interested in their roles building American cities. Extending an analysis developed in his 1985 book on black migration in early 20th century Milwaukee, he depicts cities as spaces of economic and political opportunity not available in rural settings.

They are places where people of color—and in particular black communities—have been able to thrive. Without minimizing restrictions on jobs, housing, and civil rights, he describes how Africans established important employment niches, formed religious, civil and labor organizations, and connected with the burgeoning resistance to slavery in colonial cities from New Orleans to Boston.

Enslaved and free black workers built the roads, buildings, fortifications, and other infrastructure, performed essential household and service labor, and toiled in a wide variety of crafts.

Perhaps the most striking characteristic of black workers in colonial America was their skill. Newspapers in Boston, New York, and Charleston carried ads for the purchase of enslaved carpenters, seamstresses, bakers, and blacksmiths, and Philadelphia slave owners turned a large “share of the ordinary trades of the city” over to black craftspeople. Some Africans arrived with canoe building, carpentry, blacksmithing, and navigational skills, but owners and employers had obvious incentives to train enslaved workers in other artisan fields, too.

Skills gave these black workers a modicum of independence, providing in some cases independent sources of income, and increased their ability to escape or purchase freedom for themselves and their loved ones. The skilled trades also helped connect them to local and international political movements, especially those opposed to slavery.

Once the Northern states abolished slavery after the American Revolution, free black communities, often centered on artisan work, became hotbeds for the Underground Railroad and the growing abolitionist movement.

Most black people in America are the distant relatives of slaves - people taken from Africa hundreds of years ago, and forced to work in the US for free.

At least 12 million Africans were taken to the Americas as slaves between 1532 and 1832, and at least a third of them in British ships.

Many slaves died on the journey to America, and those who survived were treated terribly.

They were forced to work for nothing on big farm lands called plantations growing things like tobacco and cotton.

Most slaves would work really hard for up to 18 hours a day in very bad conditions.

They had a poor diet and no healthcare - often walking for miles in the hot sun, living in rough huts and sleeping on a dirt floor.

Many masters would control their slaves by using violence.

But as time went by, calls began to grow to end the slave trade in America but not everyone was happy about it.

In 1860, a group of states in the south of the USA broke away from the rest of the country because they wanted to keep slavery going.

The Confederate States, as they became known, eventually lost to the northern United States - led by President Abraham Lincoln - in the American Civil War. But let us not be fooled for Abraham Lincoln said that if he could win the civil war , and keep the slaves in place he would of.

Slavery was eventually banned in the USA in 1865 but things still weren't equal.

Racist groups including the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) began to grow in the south of the country with white members intimidating, attacking and killing black people.

Most southern states soon began introducing new rules - known as 'Jim Crow' laws - which stopped black Americans from being able to vote and forced them to use separate shops, restaurants, parks and schools. This was called segregation.

The Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution was supposed to give newly freed slaves equal citizenship with white people.

However, in 1896, the US Supreme Court - the highest court in the country - ruled in Plessy v Ferguson that segregated facilities for black and white people had to be "separate but equal".

But in reality, black people's facilities were almost always worse than white people's.

Poverty was also a major problem. Black people often had lower paid jobs in society, and many black women worked as servants to white people.

Gradually, black Americans began to challenge their unequal status.

There had been successful attempts to improve the status of black people. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was set up in 1909, which helped to provide lawyers for black people who were treated very badly by the courts.

The Harlem Renaissance, in the 1920s and 1930s, led to black Americans looking into their own history and beginning to connect to their African roots.

Black writers such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston wrote books and poetry that explored and celebrated black culture.

And in 1942, James Farmer founded the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to challenge racial segregation by using non-violent actions such as protesting.

However, it was in the 1950s and 1960s that the civil rights movement in the United States really began to pick up pace to give black Americans legal equality.

In 1954, Brown v Board of Education was a historic case that reached the highest courts in America.

With the help of the NAACP, Reverend Brown, a black man, won the right in the Supreme Court to send his children to a white school in the state of Kansas.

In a huge decision, the Supreme Court finally ruled that segregation could not ever be equal.

A year later, 42-year-old black woman Rosa Parks politely refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man, an act which was against the law in the state of Alabama.

Her protest sparked black people to stop using buses for 381 days, led by a Baptist minister called Rev Martin Luther King.

Mrs Parks was fined $14 at court but the bus boycott led to the end of different treatment for black people on public transport.

In 1957, nine black students carried out their right to go to a white school in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Mobs threatened the students, and even the governor of Arkansas tried to stop them by sending in the state National Guard.

President Eisenhower eventually took charge and ordered the soldiers to protect the students as they went to school.

On 28 August 1963, US civil rights leader Martin Luther King marched to Washington DC, the capital city of the USA.

He delivered a ground-breaking speech in front of a crowd of 250,000 people from all backgrounds.

His 17-minute long speech was called 'I have a Dream', and talked about living in a future where all people are equal, regardless of the colour of their skin.

His speech went down in history, inspired millions of people, and helped to bring about the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

This Act ended the separation of people by race in public places, and banned companies from not giving people a job on the basis of race, gender, religion or national origin.

In 1964, Martin Luther King was awarded the the Nobel Peace Prize for his campaigning but four years later in 1968 he was shot and killed.

To remember his achievements, people in the US celebrate his memory every year on Martin Luther King Day by holding parades and giving people a day off work or school. Please let us not forget Malcolm X.