Black History Month — Remembering Every Black Man and Woman’s Contributions, Part I — The Unpaid Wages of Slavery
Note: We began writing this series in time for the February 1 beginning of Black History Month. It has “marinated” as a draft this long because of our desire to tackle what could be controversial issues without causing unnecessary offense.
Frederick Douglass. Harriett Tubman. Thurgood Marshall. Jackie Robinson. Martin Luther King. Rosa Parks.
As we observe Black History Month this month, what first comes to mind is these and many other famous Black Americans with familiar names.
But What About Those We Don’t Remember — in This Month or Any Time?
On January 20th, 2009, President Barack Obama took his oath of office on the steps of the United States Capitol,a building constructed with the labor of anonymous slaves on land surveyed in part by Benjamin Banneker, a mathematician, astronomer, and second-generation free black man.
Slaves at the Capitol (Community Folk Art Center)
Slaves and free Black Americans didn’t just help build the Capitol — they played a huge role in building this country.
Nor were they “just” laborers. They were surveyors like Benjamin Banneker, they were carpenters and brick layers, inventors and innovators.
The Value of Slavery — $20.3 Trillion
According to Dr. Waldron H. Giles, Ph.D in a 2006 article entitled “Slavery and the American Economy”:
The results of the economic value of this free labor are, when inflated conservatively at 3% to 2006 dollars, a staggering value of 20.3 trillion dollars, or … $563,450 per African American currently living in the US.
This figure doesn’t take into account the millions of dollars “earned” by Americans who made their living by buying and selling other human beings or otherwise profited from the slave trade. Many of these dollars can be traced to present-day businesses and institutions.
Again quoting Dr. Giles, slave-economy profits provided the source of many well-known fortunes:
Aetna Insurance Co., E.I. Dupont, and J.P. Morgan, Brown University, to name a … few, reaped substantial benefits from … slavery. For example, Pierre Bauduy purchased 4 out of the original 16 shares issued for the E.I. DuPont Company for $8,000, [having] … obtained his money from the profits of a Haitian plantation … .
The manufacturers of slave ships and cotton merchants heavily financed Brown University in its early beginnings.
Aetna Insurance Co. sold insurance to protect slave owners from the losses of runaway slaves.
One company, J.P. Morgan, made so much money off the backs of the cotton, tobacco, and rice-picking slaves that it loaned money to the US government during the Civil War.
Even after slavery’s official end, freed slaves and their descendants worked for little or no pay and frequently under horrific conditions to keep American agriculture cheap and to power the industries that built our World War I and II war machines.
Whether inventors or sharecroppers, physicians or field slaves, every Black American man and woman who worked in the U.S. during this country’s first four hundred years made a significant contribution to our nation’s economic and cultural vitality and success.
Here’s just a little slice of this reality:
American and Caribbean slaves often have been portrayed merely as unskilled agricultural field hands and domestic servants. However, … “the common belief that all slaves were menial laborers is false;” similar to slaves in other eras and cultures, bound laborers in the colonies and early United States worked at a multitude of semi-skilled and skilled professions.
In some trades, enslaved Blacks worked side-by-side with white wage workers. This was especially true in the maritime economy, where slaves labored as boatmen, lightermen, shipwrights, caulkers, riggers, sailmakers, coopers, mariners, and pilots.
Ex-slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass worked as a caulker in a Baltimore shipyard in the 1830s and commented on this curious fact: “Until a very little while after I went there [to the shipyard], white and black ship-carpenters worked side-by-side, and no one seemed to see any impropriety in it. All hands seemed to be very well satisfied. Many of the black carpenters were free men.
So while while we all deeply regret they worked under slavery conditions, treated as property rather than humans, the fact remains that black slaves were a vital part of the American labor force, across a broader swath of the economy than just the menial agricultural occupations generally imagined, with their forced labor leading to the production of great wealth — wealth from which all Americans probably benefit to some degree (e.g., we can all buy DuPont products or DuPont-invented ones — such as neoprene, nylon, Corian, Teflon, Mylar, Kevlar, Tyvek and Lycra — and can all aspire to attend or send our children to Brown University).
