Many economic experts consider the American economy one of the strongest in the world and it is in no small part to the work of African Americans.
While diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) has been on the chopping block across the federal government and corporations, even conservative Republican President Donald Trump admitted in October 2019 “African Americans built this nation.”
Civil rights leaders, historians and leading economists have noted the wealth of the U.S. was built by the blood, sweat and tears of African Americans who received little or no compensation for their efforts since 1619, when the first Blacks arrived at the Jamestown Virginia settlement.
Black Forced Labor: From Indentured Servants to Slavery
Indentured servants are people who work for an employer for a set term of years in exchange for living accommodation, food and clothing.
Indentured servants first arrived in America in the decade following the settlement of Jamestown by the Virginia Company in 1607. Black people came to Jamestown in 1619 not as slaves, but as indentured servants, as reported by PBS’s “History Detectives” show, “Indentured Servants in the U.S.”
The idea of indentured servitude was born of a need for cheap labor. While the life of an indentured servant was harsh and restrictive, it wasn’t slavery.
With no slave laws in place, Africans were initially treated as indentured servants and given the same opportunities for freedom due as whites.
However, slave laws were soon passed – in Massachusetts in 1641 and Virginia in 1661 –and any small freedoms that might have existed for Blacks were taken away.
Landowners, according to “History Detectives,” turned to African slaves as a more profitable and ever-renewable source of labor and the shift from indentured servants to forced, racial slavery began.
Enslaved Africans Become the U.S. Slave Workforce
As the United States developed, there is overwhelming evidence that the horrors of slavery helped strengthen America into an economic and world power.
In a working paper, “The Contribution of Enslaved Workers to Output and Growth in the Antebellum United States” by economist Mark Stelzner of Connecticut College and historian Sven Beckett of Harvard University, the scholars showed that the work of enslaved Africans was an important driver of growth not only in the South but nationally.
“Slavery was an important institution for economic development in the United States, and that the unrequited labor of enslaved women, men and children helped produce in significant ways the nation’s economic expansion in the two decades before the Civil War,” the authors wrote.
Post-Slavery and Sharecropping
A post-slavery system of sharecropping emerged during and after the Reconstruction era.
Under sharecropping, a tenant or sharecropper would have a legal agreement with a landowner to rent land, supplies and equipment to produce a cash crop such as tobacco and cotton.
The arrangement would have the sharecropper, in most cases, remaining in debt to the landowner due to the increasing costs of supplies and equipment and the low profit margins of tobacco or cotton (as calculated by the landowner who was often white).
In a November 2018 post by Equal Justice Initiative, it was reported that African Americans who challenged the sharecropping system faced threats, violence, and even murder.
In the North, African Americans faced legalized discrimination in employment and were restricted from joining many unions, according to an article “African American Workers Built America” by Asha Banerjee and Cameron Johnson, published by The Center for Law and Social Policy.
“Companies used Black workers as strike breakers to misdirect white workers’ anger and frustration,” Banerjee and Johnson wrote. “New Deal programs excluded Black agricultural and domestic workers. And 1930s ‘progressive’ public benefits legislation such as the Social Security Act was pro-white legislation that neglects Black workers, especially women.”
Black Workers, Labor Leaders of Today
Presently, Black workers make up a larger part of the workforce and face record-low unemployment.
Nevertheless, racial disparities persist, with African American graduates nearly 10% more likely to be employed in an occupation not requiring a college degree than their white peers.
Further, large numbers of Black workers experience workplace discrimination, and Black women are less likely to be promoted than men or other women, Banerjee and Johnson report.
Despite disparities and challenges, African Americans are making progress in business, with eight Fortune 500 companies having Black CEOs in 2024, a near-record high. However, Blacks Americans still make up only 1.6% of Fortune 500 CEOs, compared to 14.4% of the U.S. population.
Ursula Burns, who served as the first Black female CEO of a Fortune 500 company—Xerox—encourages people to pursue their dreams despite hurdles.
“The most important thing that I tell people about my success is that I never gave up. I never let anyone convince me that I couldn’t do something,” said Burns, 66.