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Of Blood and Sweat: Black Lives and the Making of White Power and Wealth
"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 1% 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.
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 1% 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.
416 pages, Hardcover
Published April 5, 2022
17 people are currently reading
760 people want to read
About the author
Clyde W. Ford
20 books31 followersClyde W. Ford is a software engineer, a chiropractor, and a psychotherapist. He’s also the award-winning author of twelve works of fiction and non-fiction, whose most recent book, THINK BLACK: A Memoir will be published in September 2019 by Amistad/HarperCollins.
Clyde W. Ford earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in History and Mathematics from Wesleyan University in 1971, then worked as a systems engineer for IBM. In 1977, he returned to school, enrolling at Western States University in Portland, Oregon, where he completed his Doctorate in Chiropractic. Later, he undertook post-doctoral training in psychotherapy at the Synthesis Education Foundation of Massachusetts, under the direction of Steven Schatz, and the Psychosynthesis Institute of New York. Ford was in private practice as a chiropractor and psychotherapist, first in Richmond, Virginia, and later in Bellingham, Washington.
At sixteen, Ford traveled to West Africa in the wake of Martin Luther King’s assassination, attempting to come to terms with the tragedy. The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported, “The young man traveled alone that summer to the Elmina slave portal, on the continent’s west coast, and heard voices in a mystical experience that permanently marked him.” Looking back on the event more than 20 years later, Ford told the Plain Dealer, “The meaning of my own life is based in the meaning of those who have gone before. The ancestors are there, still informing, still influencing us.”
BODY-MIND HEALING
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Clyde wrote about body-mind healing; in the mid-1990s he concentrated on the healing of racial wounds; and in 2000, he wrote about mythology, and how myths could heal psychic wounds. Besides exploring healing issues in books and on the lecture circuit, he has conducted seminars and written numerous articles for Massage Magazine, Massage Therapy Journal, and Chiropractic Economics. In 1991 East West Magazine recognized Ford’s work in somatic therapy as one of the 20 trends reshaping society. Linda Elliot and Mark Mayell in East West Magazine described Ford as “an ‘engineer’ who’s building a bridge across the chasm that separates practitioners who focus only on body structures and those who concentrate specifically on the psyche.” From 1992 to 1996 Ford regularly taught somatic psychology at the Institut fur Angewandte Kinesiologie in Freiburg, Germany.
In 1989 Ford wrote his first book, Where Healing Waters Meet, about his many years of experience working with the healing of emotional wounds through touch and movement therapy, rather than talk therapy. That was followed in 1993 by Compassionate Touch, a book which amplified these themes and documented Ford’s work with adult survivors of sexual abuse, mainly women.
RACIAL HEALING
The riots and racial divisiveness in Los Angeles following the Rodney King verdict in 1992 left Ford feeling frustrated. After speaking to a number of friends who shared his frustration, he decided to write a book about social justice and racial healing. “When we’re dealing with an issue like racism,” Ford told Karen Abbott in the Rocky Mountain News, “So many people feel it’s a daunting issue and that they can’t do anything. A certain paralysis sets in. But anybody and everybody can make a difference.” While Ford remained optimistic, he also admitted that the roots of racial discord run deep. “It’s really not just African American’s place to deal with that,” he told Linda Richards in January Magazine. “We have in our history our own reckoning with that process. But the entire society needs to reckon with that.”
In 1994 Ford completed We Can All Get Along: 50 Steps You Can Take to Help End Racism. “Racism is a social issue,” Ford told Cynthia M. Hodnett in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “It is important to look beneath the surface to find out what the issues are that need to be addressed.” Ford realized that many people were
Clyde W. Ford earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in History and Mathematics from Wesleyan University in 1971, then worked as a systems engineer for IBM. In 1977, he returned to school, enrolling at Western States University in Portland, Oregon, where he completed his Doctorate in Chiropractic. Later, he undertook post-doctoral training in psychotherapy at the Synthesis Education Foundation of Massachusetts, under the direction of Steven Schatz, and the Psychosynthesis Institute of New York. Ford was in private practice as a chiropractor and psychotherapist, first in Richmond, Virginia, and later in Bellingham, Washington.
At sixteen, Ford traveled to West Africa in the wake of Martin Luther King’s assassination, attempting to come to terms with the tragedy. The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported, “The young man traveled alone that summer to the Elmina slave portal, on the continent’s west coast, and heard voices in a mystical experience that permanently marked him.” Looking back on the event more than 20 years later, Ford told the Plain Dealer, “The meaning of my own life is based in the meaning of those who have gone before. The ancestors are there, still informing, still influencing us.”
BODY-MIND HEALING
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Clyde wrote about body-mind healing; in the mid-1990s he concentrated on the healing of racial wounds; and in 2000, he wrote about mythology, and how myths could heal psychic wounds. Besides exploring healing issues in books and on the lecture circuit, he has conducted seminars and written numerous articles for Massage Magazine, Massage Therapy Journal, and Chiropractic Economics. In 1991 East West Magazine recognized Ford’s work in somatic therapy as one of the 20 trends reshaping society. Linda Elliot and Mark Mayell in East West Magazine described Ford as “an ‘engineer’ who’s building a bridge across the chasm that separates practitioners who focus only on body structures and those who concentrate specifically on the psyche.” From 1992 to 1996 Ford regularly taught somatic psychology at the Institut fur Angewandte Kinesiologie in Freiburg, Germany.
In 1989 Ford wrote his first book, Where Healing Waters Meet, about his many years of experience working with the healing of emotional wounds through touch and movement therapy, rather than talk therapy. That was followed in 1993 by Compassionate Touch, a book which amplified these themes and documented Ford’s work with adult survivors of sexual abuse, mainly women.
RACIAL HEALING
The riots and racial divisiveness in Los Angeles following the Rodney King verdict in 1992 left Ford feeling frustrated. After speaking to a number of friends who shared his frustration, he decided to write a book about social justice and racial healing. “When we’re dealing with an issue like racism,” Ford told Karen Abbott in the Rocky Mountain News, “So many people feel it’s a daunting issue and that they can’t do anything. A certain paralysis sets in. But anybody and everybody can make a difference.” While Ford remained optimistic, he also admitted that the roots of racial discord run deep. “It’s really not just African American’s place to deal with that,” he told Linda Richards in January Magazine. “We have in our history our own reckoning with that process. But the entire society needs to reckon with that.”
In 1994 Ford completed We Can All Get Along: 50 Steps You Can Take to Help End Racism. “Racism is a social issue,” Ford told Cynthia M. Hodnett in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “It is important to look beneath the surface to find out what the issues are that need to be addressed.” Ford realized that many people were
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
December 24, 2022
An important book about how the enslavement of Black people in the United States helped build many of the country’s institutions and structures of wealth. Clyde Ford connects events and themes throughout the United States’ history to show how white wealth emerged from slavery. While I found the writing style a bit dry at times – I echo what at least one other reviewer has said about the book reading like a textbook with some creative nonfiction thrown in - Of Blood and Sweat still effectively highlights why we need ongoing reparations for Black people in this country, as well as policies like affirmative action.
March 2, 2022
Of Blood and Sweat shows how white wealth and power in America was built on the literal backs of Black labor. While many can easily see how agriculture was impacted by slavery, what might not be as clear is that every system can trace it's roots to this despicable time in our history. From banking to insurance to policing and beyond, Ford maps the trail in detail. This book covers the time period from 1619, when the first slaves arrived in Jamestown, to the end of Reconstruction. He focuses on this time frame because this is when America was developing the policies, laws, and economics that shaped our nation. He considers this work to be Part 1 in an ongoing story. Of Blood and Sweat should be required reading in school, right alongside Caste by Isabel Wilkerson. America may have made some progress since slavery, but we still have so much farther to go. 4.5 stars
August 7, 2022
of all the books that I have read on this subject matter-and there have been many-I found this to be the most useful. It was not peppered with anecdotes or editorialized, it was just fact. Person, place, event and date spelled out to show you how it impacted the world we currently live in. This is a must read in my opinion
August 24, 2022
Necessary read. His thesis is that without slavery there is no freedom. How do we move forward from that?
May 24, 2022
In this engaging historical work, Ford demonstrates how slavery has affected every aspect of America’s founding and development. By meticulously reviewing historical texts, the case is built to demonstrate how vital slavery was in developing and sustaining white wealth and power in the US. This eye-opening work provides a vital historical framework for understanding the case for, and need for, reparations (i.e., freedom dues) today.
March 15, 2022
This book was a bit different than I expected and took a while to get started for that reason. However, once I really dove in it proved to be a very strong addition to this area of non-fiction. I was expecting something like The 1619 Project, but this reads more like a history textbook than that. It looks at similar seems, but spends much more time on the historical time periods when men and women were enslaved and brought to the Americas. In that sense, I actually felt that it was a very strong companion piece to The 1619 Project. Both books focus on the same overarching themes yet cover different ground and unique insights. I think this time period in history is very rarely discussed from the perspective of this book and I learned a lot throughout. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who has read The 1619 Project or These Truths, and even those who have not.
*I received an eARC from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
*I received an eARC from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
October 10, 2022
Of Blood and Sweat is in all likelihood the book I would recommend for folks entirely uninitiated to the concept of the stolen power and stolen wealth Whites have in this country. It is a well-argued primer on the events of 1619 leading to the Compromise of 1877, but with occasional analogues to the present elaborated upon, or an occasional aside tying it to current political conflicts.
There's a wealth of material here: the origin of the police out of slave patrols, the arc from Reconstruction to the Compromise of 1877, the domestic slave trade, Black Jacks, the Civil War, railroads, and much more. Ford does this effectively with well-structured chapters concisely supporting his argument. It gives a very coherent survey of Black history also in its own right. It intersects with The Invention of the White Race, The Ledger and the Chain, Prisoners of the American Dream, and shares a publisher with Paula Giddings at Amistad Books, a publishing house I strongly recommend across the board.
There are, however, occasional dalliances into creative nonfiction that have varying degrees of effectiveness. At best, they serve as a didactic tool to clarify some trickier concepts (in many cases, the financial ones, and in some pervasive historical inaccuracies) and at worst just sound like third-person historical accounts auto-adjusted to be in first person. The dialogue is stilted - as to be expected - but there a few where I liked Ford's usage of the device and a few where it felt unnecessary and it diminished the momentum of the book.
Absolutely recommend this as a springboard and/or gateway into many facets of Black history, with each chapter being its own exploratory topic with plenty of other excellent literature available - Blackmon's Slavery By Another Name, and Reconstruction by Foner - and it does inspire one to learn more. Probably a five-star read for college students who want a clear, entertaining, and educational book that keeps things interesting, is quite provocative, settles a lot of accounts (e.g. the servitude-versus-slaves epoch), stops to explain things out, and so on. It's also an excellent opportunity to see all of the threads come together into a narrative arc specifically about the wealth and power stolen from Black people. A great read I'd recommend to just about anybody who isn't already in the throes of new scholarship on the topic.
There's a wealth of material here: the origin of the police out of slave patrols, the arc from Reconstruction to the Compromise of 1877, the domestic slave trade, Black Jacks, the Civil War, railroads, and much more. Ford does this effectively with well-structured chapters concisely supporting his argument. It gives a very coherent survey of Black history also in its own right. It intersects with The Invention of the White Race, The Ledger and the Chain, Prisoners of the American Dream, and shares a publisher with Paula Giddings at Amistad Books, a publishing house I strongly recommend across the board.
There are, however, occasional dalliances into creative nonfiction that have varying degrees of effectiveness. At best, they serve as a didactic tool to clarify some trickier concepts (in many cases, the financial ones, and in some pervasive historical inaccuracies) and at worst just sound like third-person historical accounts auto-adjusted to be in first person. The dialogue is stilted - as to be expected - but there a few where I liked Ford's usage of the device and a few where it felt unnecessary and it diminished the momentum of the book.
Absolutely recommend this as a springboard and/or gateway into many facets of Black history, with each chapter being its own exploratory topic with plenty of other excellent literature available - Blackmon's Slavery By Another Name, and Reconstruction by Foner - and it does inspire one to learn more. Probably a five-star read for college students who want a clear, entertaining, and educational book that keeps things interesting, is quite provocative, settles a lot of accounts (e.g. the servitude-versus-slaves epoch), stops to explain things out, and so on. It's also an excellent opportunity to see all of the threads come together into a narrative arc specifically about the wealth and power stolen from Black people. A great read I'd recommend to just about anybody who isn't already in the throes of new scholarship on the topic.
May 15, 2023
A very intricate look into the history of the United States especially its foundations, and the intrinsic connection between white wealth and power and Black labor and bondage.
Ford manages the stories and different people, sometimes diving into narrative, but always ties it into contexts of the time. Ford also manages to tie history into the context of today, and shows how the ripples from the actions of the past affect the present day. A must read for any person interested in history, as it reveals a lot of racism tied into laws and history of this country; a lot of which other historians chose to ignore or whitewash.
Ford manages the stories and different people, sometimes diving into narrative, but always ties it into contexts of the time. Ford also manages to tie history into the context of today, and shows how the ripples from the actions of the past affect the present day. A must read for any person interested in history, as it reveals a lot of racism tied into laws and history of this country; a lot of which other historians chose to ignore or whitewash.
July 15, 2022
Well written, in-depth look at various aspects of society that were invented or created by white men while exploiting black lives. Examples include the railroad, formal police departments, the cotton gin, and finance. Essential reading to continue to learn about the history of the US and to stay informed about how many modern day institutions were created with the intent to exclude certain people.
Sincere thanks to NetGalley & Amistad Press for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.
Sincere thanks to NetGalley & Amistad Press for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.
August 26, 2022
Very informative overview that starts with the first slaves that are kidnapped and brought to N America and ends with the Emancipation Celebration in Elmira, NY, on Aug 3, 1880. The author calls this Part One and expresses the hope that America will eventually deal fairly with her Black citizens and Part Two will be the next part of the story. This book is very interesting and easy to read. The Audible version is excellent.
July 23, 2025
no words. as my mother is known to say, “white people are the worst.” so much important missing history. reopen the schools but for anyone with a confederate flag decal on their stupid truck. Black people in america have experienced truly unimaginable pain and suffering that america has tried so hard to gloss over, minimize, and neglect
September 14, 2022
Wow. Just...wow. This needs to be required reading in every American history class.
April 12, 2023
A must read.
April 16, 2023
Book 7/60
5/5 stars!
Wow what a profound book. What a way to start Black History Month!
Of Blood and Sweat shows you how white wealth and power became to be and how systems were put in place to disenfranchise black Americans. It examines everything from agriculture, banking, transportation, ,policing, insurance and politics.
While Ford focuses on a time period from the beginning of American slavery to the reconstruction period you can see how even today we have room for improvement.
5/5 stars!
Wow what a profound book. What a way to start Black History Month!
Of Blood and Sweat shows you how white wealth and power became to be and how systems were put in place to disenfranchise black Americans. It examines everything from agriculture, banking, transportation, ,policing, insurance and politics.
While Ford focuses on a time period from the beginning of American slavery to the reconstruction period you can see how even today we have room for improvement.
January 10, 2024
Heavy read but a very important topic, left me with lots to think about.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews