Book Reviews
From the Jacket Cover
- Category: Reviews
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.
Library Journal
- Category: Reviews
Psychotherapist and novelist Ford (Think Black) presents a powerful and personal argument about the myriad ways Black labor created white wealth in the United States over the centuries. Ford uses the lives of specific Black men and women at pivotal moments—especially 1619, 1787, and the end of Reconstruction—to reveal the ongoing dynamics and interplay of freedom and unfreedom (especially slavery).
Publisher's Weekly (Starred Review)
- Category: Reviews
Novelist and psychotherapist Ford (Think Black) unearths in this fascinating history the inextricable links between America’s “systems of power” and the horrors of slavery. From the arrival of enslaved Africans in 17th-century Virginia to the end of Reconstruction in 1877, Ford reveals how “Black lives created White wealth and power,” and how African Americans have been met with “outright betrayal and brutality” when they asked for their fair share.
Kirkus Reviews
- Category: Reviews
Humanities scholar Ford looks at the myriad—and uncompensated—contributions African Americans have made to the economies and cultures of the U.S. and beyond. The author opens with a little-known court case from Colonial Virginia wherein an indentured Black man sued not just for release from his expired contract, but also for “freedom dues.”
Book Page (Starred Review)
- Category: Reviews
In Of Blood and Sweat: Black Lives and the Making of White Power and Wealth, Clyde W. Ford confronts readers with a difficult truth about the current state of American affairs: Our politics, economy and social structure are inextricably linked to the enslavement of Black people.
