By Musa T Bey

From the ashes of slavery, Black people in the United States emerged into what was promised as freedom but quickly became a new and brutal system of racial capitalism. The period between the collapse of Reconstruction in 1877 and the rise of the New Deal in the 1930s is not just a dark chapter in American racial history — it is a foundational period in the building of American capitalism, one where the super-exploitation of Black labor was central to the profits of Southern landlords, Northern industrialists, and the political class that united them.

This era saw the systematic stripping of Black political rights, the violent suppression of Black economic independence, and the relentless exploitation of Black labor at the bottom rung of an emerging capitalist economy. And yet, Black workers, sharecroppers, and urban poor did not passively endure — they resisted, organized, and laid the groundwork for a deeper, more revolutionary challenge to American capitalism itself.

1877: The Defeat of Reconstruction and the Triumph of Racial Capitalism

Reconstruction (1865-1877) had briefly opened a path where Black political power and land ownership could have transformed the South’s economy. But that vision threatened not only the Southern planter class but also Northern capitalists who wanted cheap cotton and a divided working class. When federal troops withdrew in 1877, it was not simply the abandonment of Black people — it was a realignment of American class power.

White supremacist forces crushed Black political participation through terror, disfranchisement, and legalized segregation. The Black vote was erased because Black political power posed a threat to the economic order. Black-majority legislatures in the South had taxed the wealthy, built public schools, and advocated land reform — policies that the ruling class, North and South, could not tolerate.

Sharecropping and Debt Peonage: Slavery By Another Name

Economically, Black people were pushed into a system designed to maintain their status as an exploited labor force. Sharecropping replaced chattel slavery with wage slavery and debt peonage. Black families worked white-owned land, paid through a share of the crop that was never enough to escape debt. The store credit system — controlled by white merchants — ensured that Black farmers stayed trapped, unable to build wealth or independence.

This system wasn’t a relic of feudalism — it was fully compatible with American capitalism, providing the cheap raw materials (cotton, tobacco) that fed Northern industry. The South’s racial order and the North’s industrial boom were two sides of the same capitalist coin. Black labor was essential to America’s growth, but always under conditions that maximized exploitation and denied Black workers the basic rights afforded (grudgingly) to white workers.

Racial Violence: Terror as Labor Discipline

The reign of terror against Black people — from lynchings to race riots — was not random or purely “emotional” outbursts of white hatred. It functioned as labor discipline. Black sharecroppers who challenged the system, tried to organize, or sought better pay were often the first victims of violence. In cities, Black workers who dared to compete for skilled jobs or demand equal pay provoked white mobs.

White supremacy, in this period, operated as a tool to divide and conquer the working class. Poor whites, themselves exploited by capitalist bosses, were given racial privileges — access to the vote, better jobs, and social status — in exchange for maintaining the racial hierarchy and policing Black labor. This racial division was a central pillar of American capitalism, ensuring that class solidarity between Black and white workers was broken before it could ever form.

The Great Migration: Black Labor Power on the Move

Between 1910 and 1930, nearly two million Black people fled the South in what became the Great Migration. This was not only an escape from terror but also a strategic relocation of Black labor to the industrial North. Factories needed workers, especially during World War I, and Black migrants were brought in as strikebreakers and cheap labor. But once in the cities, Black workers began to organize.

The migration shifted the balance of Black political and economic life. It created the urban Black working class that would later form the backbone of radical labor movements. Black workers faced racism in the North, but they also encountered the burgeoning labor movement — and some, seeing the shared exploitation between themselves and immigrant workers, began to build class-based alliances.

Black Labor and the Rising Socialist Current

In the 1920s and 1930s, the radical wing of Black politics became explicitly socialist. Leaders like A. Philip Randolph, editor of The Messenger and founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, openly denounced both capitalism and racism as intertwined systems of oppression. Randolph’s union was not just about better wages — it was about breaking the grip of racial division within the working class and building Black worker power.

Organizations like the African Blood Brotherhood, and later the National Negro Congress, adopted explicitly Marxist frameworks. They identified Black oppression not merely as a racial problem but as part of the class struggle, where Black workers occupied the lowest rung of an exploitative system designed to extract maximum surplus from their labor while denying them political rights.

The Communist Party USA, flawed but often ahead of mainstream unions, made significant inroads among Black workers by openly opposing segregation, organizing integrated strikes, and defending Black victims of racial terror, such as in the famous Scottsboro Boys case. For many Black radicals, socialism offered a framework that finally explained their condition: they were the super-exploited proletariat within a racialized capitalist system.

The New Deal: A Deal for Whites, Chains for Blacks

The Great Depression exposed the deep rot at the heart of American capitalism. Black communities were devastated — already poor, they fell into destitution as jobs disappeared and relief programs excluded them. Roosevelt’s New Deal, while celebrated in mainstream narratives, largely preserved the racial capitalist order.

Key programs like Social Security and the National Labor Relations Act excluded agricultural and domestic workers — a carve-out specifically designed to placate Southern white elites who demanded the continued subjugation of Black labor. Public works programs employed Black workers but in segregated and lower-paid jobs. Housing programs like the FHA institutionalized racial segregation and blocked Black families from building wealth through home ownership.

Even as millions of white workers were lifted into a new middle class by the New Deal, Black workers were kept in the underclass — a reserve army of labor to be called upon when needed and discarded when not. This was not an accident; it was the structural logic of a system built on racial division and exploitation.

Toward a Black Working-Class Revolt

By the late 1930s, however, the seeds of revolt were visible. Black workers were increasingly organizing in the new industrial unions of the CIO, which, under leftist leadership, was more open to interracial organizing. Randolph’s threatened March on Washington in 1941 — demanding defense jobs and the desegregation of the armed forces — showed that Black labor was becoming a political force capable of shaking the foundations of both racial order and capitalist exploitation.

In this period, the most radical voices in Black America rejected the empty promises of liberal inclusion. They saw clearly that racial oppression could not be ended without dismantling the capitalist system that fed off of cheap Black labor. Their call was not for charity, but for solidarity — a new working-class movement that tore down both the racial and economic hierarchies of American society.

Conclusion: Black Freedom as Class Revolution

From the end of Reconstruction through the New Deal, Black life in America was defined by systemic super-exploitation, racial terror, and political exclusion. But Black people were never passive victims. As they fought for survival, they also built a revolutionary tradition that linked their struggle to the broader fight against capitalism.

The Black freedom struggle in this era was not just about civil rights — it was about class power. Black workers stood at the sharpest edge of American exploitation, and their fight pointed toward a deeper transformation: the destruction of the racial capitalist system that defined American life from its founding