Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the South

In 1884, a young Black journalist from the post-Reconstruction South wrote what would become one of the most radical analyses of American racism ever published. T. Thomas Fortune did something no one in his era dared to do: he argued that the hatred crushing Black Americans was not merely racial animus but a calculated economic system, one that had been woven into the nation's fabric since its founding. In this fierce, meticulously argued work, Fortune exposes how land monopolies, Sharecropping, and disenfranchisement conspired to keep Black laborers in chains of another kind. He saw what many refused to recognize: that the real battle lines were not between Black and white, but between the owners of capital and those who labor. Fortune's prose crackles with moral urgency as he recounts the injustices done to his people, yet his analysis transcends mere racial grievance. He understood that until America confronted the uncomfortable truth that its racial hierarchy served economic exploitation, the nation's founding ideals would remain a bitter joke. Robin D.G. Kelley calls this book radical, and it is: Fortune was diagnosing the precise disease that still afflicts this country, and his prescription remains as unflinching today as it was 140 years ago.