ABSTRACT
This chapter documents the extensive contributions of black labor over nearly four centuries of United States dramatic development. This reality has meant great contributions to the economy by black workers and their families, contributions so massive that there would perhaps be no United States without them. The largest-scale African American rebellion and resistance to the slavery system took place during the Civil War years of the 1860s. The most past and present accounts of slavery by mainstream analysts of various kinds have ignored or tried to sanitize critical aspects of black labor and other oppressive experiences in the slavery era. Beyond their work in agriculture, enslaved workers did much of the work over two centuries that built up the country's educational, government, and transportation infrastructure, although most of this work is ignored in mainstream history books and mainstream media.
