We Built This: The Black Economic Foundations of America
They picked the cotton. They harvested the sugar. They cut the tobacco, laid the railroads, hoisted the bricks, and worked the iron. They mopped the floors and nursed the babies and sang lullabies into plantation wind. They bled in the fields and dreamed in the margins. And still, America called them nothing. But here is the truth: Black labor didn’t just contribute to the building of the United States. It was the blueprint. The steel. The scaffolding. The heartbeat.
Before the soot of the factories, before the ticker tape of Wall Street, before Carnegie and Morgan and Rockefeller were household names—Black hands had already built the engine of America’s wealth. The foundation of American capitalism is soaked in sweat and soaked in blood, and it is Black. From the auction blocks to the stock exchange, the transmutation of human beings into capital made America rich.
Slavery was not a side hustle to the American project. It was the business model. As historian Edward Baptist argues, the expanding cotton economy of the 19th century was the central driver of U.S. growth.¹ The Deep South became the world’s largest cotton exporter, feeding industrial mills from Boston to Birmingham. Enslaved people, numbering nearly four million by 1860, became America’s most valuable asset—worth more than all the banks, railroads, and manufacturing plants combined.² They were the “liquid capital” that financed a nation. Yet even as their bodies enriched the soil and their labor fattened ledgers, Black people were denied everything—wages, credit, dignity, and land.
And when the Civil War ended, so did the illusion that emancipation would bring repair. Forty acres and a mule was a broken promise. Instead came a new era of economic suppression: sharecropping, convict leasing, and wage peonage. The sharecropper might have been technically “free,” but he owed the landowner, the storekeeper, and the banker. The math never worked. The debt was rigged. The whip became paper.
In the prisons, Black men were funneled into chain gangs and leased to railroads, mines, and mills. The 13th Amendment ended slavery—except as punishment for a crime.³ That loophole became a pipeline. Entire state economies depended on the forced labor of Black prisoners, and corporations—some still in operation today—grew fat off their backs.
And still, Black Americans dreamed. Black Americans built. Black Americans innovated.
We rarely speak the names: Elijah McCoy, Garrett Morgan, Granville Woods, Alice Parker, Sarah Boone. These were inventors whose creations—automatic lubrication devices, traffic signals, safety elevators, heating systems, and ironing boards—helped modernize America.⁴ But too often, these innovations were patented under white names or sold for fractions of their value. Invention without recognition. Genius without capital. Progress without profit.
And still, Black Americans built.
From the ashes of slavery and Reconstruction rose economic enclaves like Tulsa’s Greenwood District—Black Wall Street. There, Black doctors, tailors, architects, and bankers created a self-sustaining economy. A dollar circulated up to 36 times before leaving the community.⁵ But on May 31, 1921, jealous mobs aided by police and the National Guard firebombed the district from the ground and the air. Hundreds were killed. 35 city blocks were destroyed. Insurance claims were denied. No one was held accountable. $200 million in today’s Black wealth, gone overnight.⁶ And Tulsa was not alone—Rosewood, Florida; Elaine, Arkansas; Springfield, Illinois—all witnessed white violence answering Black prosperity.
And still, Black Americans endured.
Even in the 20th century, redlining ensured that Black neighborhoods were labeled “hazardous” and deprived of credit, insurance, and investment.⁷ The GI Bill mostly bypassed Black veterans. Public housing was segregated. Banks denied loans. Meanwhile, white families bought homes, built equity, and passed that wealth to their children. This was not a coincidence. This was the blueprint.
The job market told the same story. A 2004 field study revealed that resumes with “white-sounding” names were 50% more likely to get a callback than identical resumes with “Black-sounding” names.⁸ The system didn’t just resist Black advancement; it engineered Black exclusion.
And yet, even now, the spirit of enterprise has not died. Black-owned businesses continue to rise. From tech startups to plant-based food empires, Black creators are building new roads where gates once stood. Digital platforms like WeBuyBlack and Black Nation are stitching together a new kind of economy—one rooted in circulation, not extraction. Community investment funds, co-ops, and mutual aid societies are reviving a long Black tradition of collective economics.⁹ This is not charity. This is justice with receipts.
But justice demands more than visibility. It demands repair. It demands wealth transfer, land return, capital investment, and historical truth-telling. The conversation about reparations must go beyond moral debt—it must engage with stolen assets, missed opportunity, and the systemic design of generational exclusion. It must ask, not whether Black Americans deserve compensation, but how a nation can continue to prosper on unpaid labor and unsanctioned theft.
We built this. We built this. Say it until the silence breaks. Say it until the curriculum changes. Say it until the banks come clean and the land is returned and the policies are rewritten.
America’s towers of wealth stand on Black backs. But the future must be built with open hands, shared tools, and a clear memory. If we do not reckon with the foundation, the cracks will spread. And the house will fall.
Citation List
Baptist, Edward E. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. Basic Books, 2014.
Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. Vintage Books, 2015.
Blackmon, Douglas A. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. Anchor Books, 2008.
Fouché, Rayvon. Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.
Johnson, Hannibal B. Black Wall Street: From Riot to Renaissance in Tulsa's Historic Greenwood District. Eakin Press, 1998.
Ellsworth, Scott. Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. LSU Press, 1982.
Rothstein, Richard. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. Liveright, 2017.
Bertrand, Marianne and Mullainathan, Sendhil. “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination.” American Economic Review, 2004.
Chatelain, Marcia. Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America. Liveright, 2020.