Of Blood and Sweat

Black Lives and the Making of White Power and Wealth

By: Clyde W. Ford

Narrated by: Julian Thomas

“Ford’s overlap of past and present, narrative and commentary is masterful, and makes this volume all the more valuable to those readers wise enough to allow the past to inform the future. Of Blood and Sweat is a myth-busting work of genius that will stand as the last word on this vital subject for a long time to come.”—Elizabeth Dowling Taylor, New York Times bestselling author of A Slave in the White House and The Original Black Elite

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.

Clyde W. Ford uses the lives of individual Black men and women as a lens to explore the role they have played in creating American institutions of power and wealth—in agriculture, politics, jurisprudence, law enforcement, culture, medicine, financial services, and many other fields—while not being allowed to fully participate or share in the rewards. Today, activists have taken the struggle for racial equity and justice to the streets. Of Blood and Sweat goes back through time to excavate the roots of this struggle, from pre-colonial Africa through post-Civil War America. As Ford reveals, in 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.

Painstakingly 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.

©2022 Amistad (P)2022 HarperCollins Publishers

Ford opens our eyes....

Clyde Ford opens our eyes to the history we have been too comfortable leaving covered for too long. A must read for those wanting to understand the past, digest the uncomfortable realities, and continue marching forward to repair and equality for our future.

a new minimum standard

this is the history book on the topic of black slavery and US national identity in the US that sets a new minimum standard. when these stories are absent in the official public record and education system, and censorship runs rampant, then the context of current events is lost. the authors commentary and self reflection on the material in light of current events is the type of scholarship americans should demand of their academics- dogged devotion to emotional blindness was always a tactic by the white establishment to normalize horror.

Thoroughly researched and masterfully constructed

Christians and Muslins and Jews — oh my! And pirates! And kings and queens on multiple European thrones.

These are just some of the nefarious characters who helped create and entrench — and became the first to cash in on — the massively profitable international enterprise of slavery. Through deep research directed by a uniquely insightful perspective, author Clyde Ford follows the money all the way back to the beginning, before the institution even came to America. Of Blood and Sweat: Black Lives and the Making of White Power and Wealth, documents with sobering clarity how slavery was very consciously baked into the institutions and the very founding documents of the United States, much as Black Americans’ literal blood and sweat is baked into this nation’s actual soil.

Further, he provides a productive reframing of the reparations conversation. Whether or not the idea of reparations was a concept in the British legal tradition from which American legal tradition grew, the idea of “freedom dues” definitely was. They were customary after a period of servitude, and indentured servitude was the only kind going before the aforementioned bad guys got with tobacco planters and others to decide Africans could be/should be subject to servitude for life. Ford details in the book how the founding fathers departed from tradition in this instance to create laws more supportive of slavery.

This masterwork also includes eye-opening little-known information and contextualization including horticultural details about tobacco and cotton, the crops that built the union; historical facts about the world of shipping that transported Black bodies; untold stories of courage and heroism through abolition, the Civil War and after the war; and how railroad companies owned slaves and how actual slaves built railways and bridges and other key infrastructure.

Most chilling are the book’s stories of how the South tried and succeeded in establishing a post-slavery reality as close as humanly possible to actual slavery, using both judicial and extra-judicial means, including unbelievable campaigns of murder and terror carried out by groups including the Ku Klux Klan and the Red Shirts, and how the North and federal government again and again either turned a blind eye or actually conspired in efforts to disenfranchise, dispossess and otherwise oppress former slaves and their descendants. Ford traces patterns that are irrefutable and can point a way to achieving the justice needed for this nation to ever have any hope of healing and peace.

Narrator Julian Thomas did a mostly excellent job reading the Audible edition, but he did get one thing wrong (as do many others, including Mary-Louise Parker in the 2010 film “Red”): the pronunciation of Mobile, Alabama. As the daughter of a proud native of that port city on the Gulf of Mexico, I feel it my duty to let him and everyone know that you don’t say it like a portable phone, nor like someone who can really move. The correct pronunciation is “mo-BEEL.”