The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

by Edward E. Baptist

“let the black man get upon his person the brass letters US . . . a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth or under the earth which can deny that he has earned the right of citizenship in the United States.”6

Yet white folks still kept the black folks who toiled for them in poverty, forcing African Americans to take the implicit and explicit insults of life in the Jim Crow South in silence, lest they die brutally at the hands of mobs with or without badges.