Slavery, Work, and Racism in America: A Review of Four Books

1619: Jamestown and the Forging of American Democracy By James Horn

New York, NY: Basic Books; 2018 288 pages; $28.00 ISBN-13: 978-0465064694

Empire of Cotton: A Global History By Sven Beckert

New York, NY: Vintage Books; 2015 640 pages; $18.00 ISBN-13: 978-0375414145

Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America By Joe William Trotter Jr

Oakland, CA: University of California Press; 2019 328 pages; $29.95 ISBN-13: 978-0520299450

Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America By Ibram X. Kendi

New York, NY: Nation Books; 2016 592 pages; $32.99 ISBN-13: 978-1568584638

I am reviewing four of the books I read while preparing the special section theme of this issue of AJPH, “Racial Biases and Health Disparities: 400 Years Since Jamestown.” Combined, these books gave me a rich perspective on the origins of slavery in North America. Essentially, a racist world vision that saw people of color as inferior was the indispensable complement for puritans seeking to build a democracy for themselves and overwork slaves in their tobacco and, later, cotton fields. It created an unbalanced playing field that had long-term consequences, many of which persist, particularly in public health. I therefore conceptualized this review as a selected annotated bibliography of the issue’s theme. Disclosure: I am a historian but have no specific expertise in African American history.

JAMESTOWN 1619

James Horn’s 1619: Jamestown and the Forging of American Democracy begins with the story of the battered English privateer, the White Lion, which brought to Jamestown, Virginia, the first enslaved African people documented to have arrived on the mainland of British North America in 1619. According to Horn, “they were the first of approximately four hundred thousand enslaved men, women, and children forcibly transported to British mainland America and then the United States across two and a half centuries.”^(p116)

Although the members of the Virginia Company were in the process of establishing the colony’s first General Assembly based on limited self-government, the “20. and odd Negroes” (from present-day Angola), who had been looted from a Portuguese slave ship, were quickly sold as slaves. Virginia also was the first mainland English colony to enslave native American Indians, when the short phase of pacific coexistence with the Powhatans, symbolized by the conversion of Pocahontas to Anglicanism, evolved into an all-out war. Virginians needed slaves to work in the tobacco fields. This paradox—aspiring to a democracy while systematically disenfranchising some human beings from it—is Horn’s angle for discussing the graft of slavery in the United States to-be: he argues that 1619 embodies a legacy of slavery but “also the inception of the most important political development in American history, the rise of democracy.”^(p215) Horn could have qualified that the Calvinist Republic of Geneva,^(p178) which was one of the models of democracy for the Virginian Puritans, was a form of Protestant fundamentalism that burned heretic scientists in public and imposed a strict religious moral order.

Importantly, 1619 also embodies the beginning of the long history of the resilience of the African persons forced into the Americas. According to historian Philip Morgan, quoted by Horn, “subject to grinding daily exploitation, caught in the grip of powerful forces that were often beyond their power to control, slaves nevertheless strove to create order in their lives, to preserve their humanity, to achieve dignity, and to sustain dreams of a better future.”^(p203)

KING COTTON

In Empire of Cotton: A Global History, Sven Beckert shows that cotton gave slavery in America many of its typical traits: the hunt for slaves backed by an infrastructure of traders, auctions, and pens.^(p110) The synergy of soil, slavery, land expropriation, and technology (e.g., Eli Whitney’s 1793 cotton gin) created the foundations for the industrial production of cotton. Cotton thrived in the climate and soil of parts of the American South. Growing cotton required a huge manpower that could be rapidly mobilized to respond to soaring demand and expanding markets. Slaves provided scores of workers ceaselessly exploited under a regime of violent supervision. Compared with any other cotton-producing regions of the world, such as India, the Ottoman Empire, the West Indies, and Brazil,^(p107) the United States was able to expropriate land on a continental scale from native populations: Creeks, Chickasaw, Choctaws, Cherokees, Seminoles, and other native American Indian tribes.

According to Beckert, approximately half of all slaves sold to the Americas between 1492 and 1888 arrived after 1780.^(p93) Cotton production and slavery expanded in lockstep with new territories such as South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas. The demand for slave labor was huge. By 1830, 1 million people (out of 13 million Americans) produced cotton in the United States, most of them slaves.^(p109) Just as Uncle Tom in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel was sold from Kentucky to Mississippi, an enormous shift of slave labor occurred from the upper South (e.g., Maryland and Virginia) tobacco plantations to the lower South cotton industrialized plantations.

The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, formerly dominated by the Choctaws, became in cotton production and wealth generation in the first half of the 19th century what Saudi Arabia has been for oil in the 20th century.^(p113)

THE BLACK INDUSTRIAL WORKING CLASS

Joe William Trotter Jr’s Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America describes how, because of their violent uprooting from agrarian communities, African persons brought to America to serve as slaves had to adapt to industrial work under extreme conditions. They succeeded. The process started immediately after Jamestown and was boosted over time by the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Great Migration of Black workers to the industrial northern and western states (coinciding with Jim Crow years in the South); its apogee was during the middle decades of the 20th century and World War II, when the United States became, in Franklin Roosevelt’s words, the “arsenal of democracy.”

“By 1970, the Modern Black Freedom struggle had demolished the Jim Crow order, established a new equal opportunity regime, and opened the door for significant changes in the lives of poor and working-class black families.”^(p.140) Black workers moved from being strikebreakers in 1900 to strike partners a few decades later, contributing to strong industrial unions, and negotiated collective contracts in Flint, Michigan, and elsewhere. Still, an intractable institutional racism and segregation forced male and female Black workers always to also fight for their rights as human beings and citizens and have access to decent housing and schools.

The 1950s and 1960s were prosperous for the industrial working class at large, but after the steel, meatpacking, automobile, and other mass-production industries laid off their workers massively in the 1970s and 1980s, “from New York to Los Angeles, the black urban industrial working class nearly disappeared by the early 1990s.”^(p.162)

RACISM

In Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, the five biographies of Cotton Mather (1663–1728), Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879), W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), and Angela Davis (b. 1943) serve as a skeleton for telling a much larger story. Kendi rejects the positivist notion of the progressive eradication of racism. He sees “a dual and dueling history of racial progress and the simultaneous progression of racism.” On one side, we saw the 1865 abolition of slavery, the short-lived 1875 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the 2008 election of a US president of African American descent, and on the other side, we witnessed the permanent substitution of older racist theories with newer, newfangled ones. Myth after myth, from the simple-minded Uncle Tom, to wild African origins, to small but consequential genetic differences, and now the Black criminal, the racist imagination has found new narratives to purport its fantasy of the biological superiority of White skins over Black skins. After Uncle Tom’s Cabin came The Birth of a Nation, Tarzan, King Kong, Gone With the Wind, and so on.

In 2009, President Obama said, “there probably has never been less discrimination in America than there is today” (am.ajph.link/Obama_Naacp100), but what about racism? Kendi has a point when he finds racism in any statement that does not recognize that “the different skin colors, hair textures, behaviors, and cultural ways of Blacks and Whites are on the same level, are equal in all their divergences.”^(p4) For public health, this means that we are still witnessing health disparities that were generated and maintained by a society having dual roots of democracy and slavery. Observed differences in main health indicators, such as life expectancy and incidence of chronic diseases, that correlate with skin color are artificial, human made, and therefore modifiable.