From the moment that twenty enslaved Africans emerged in bondage from a Dutch warship in 1619 to be forced to plant and harvest food and fiber for Europeans, black labor has been a central element of social production in the United States.  When African people came to the new land, they were originally brought over as indentured servants who worked for those sponsoring them until the cost of their travel expense was paid[1].  As agricultural production expanded, crops were cultivated and shipped to England to feed an emerging industrial economy[2].  Because the agricultural production was so labor intensive and large scale farming required a massive labor force, whites turned to the enslavement of humans to meet the market needs.  This was an international crime against humanity.  The criminals had the guns, steel, and diseases.  They also made the laws, defined reality, and thus sent many innocent men, woman, and children to early graves.

Initially, they attempted to enslave any group they could, including their own people.  Lessons from indentured servitude made enslaving whites challenging because they could run away and blend in with the emerging population.  The Indigenous Americans ultimately would not work out because of disease, familiarity with land (those who could escape, did), or other reasons.  The white enslavers chose to enslave African people for several reasons, including (1) African people were easy to identify among white populations (dark skin); (2) their familiarity with the land made escape difficult; (3) the precedent of African enslavement had already been established; and (4) any population that is easy to be enslaved will be enslaved in some way or another.  A population must make it hard, difficult, painful and costly for another population to attempt to enslave it. Like a zebra being ridden by a human being, or pulling a wagon---you will never see it.  The zebra won't allow it, certainly not for any extended period of time.

When studying the early history of Black women in the early development of U.S. production, at least two different yet related economic formations must be considered-Colonial agriculture and European feudalism/mercantilism. 

Although mercantilism (a pre-capitalist formation), was well underway in Britain during the early seventeenth century, it did not get transplanted in the new land because a society that could support it did not yet exist[3].  In the early colonial period, European farmers used various hand tools to cultivate the land and harvest their crops.  As these crops increased in profitability in Europe, greater portions of land became devoted to their cultivation.  Because there were not enough workers to meet the increasing demands of agriculture and the high labor costs, colonists devised and tested other ways to maximize work with minimal cost.  The key to economic success in colonial America, for individual planters as well as entire colonies, was to obtain an adequate supply of labor to grow crops that would satisfy the demands of the large European market or of the expanding markets of the colonies.  Three major institutions emerged as solutions - indentured servitude, slavery, and hired labor[4].

Indentured servitude was useful in the early development of areas that produced staple crops for export - the principle need was for workers to clear the land and grow the crops.  Rapidly, however, the need for abundant, cheap labor increased, and the skilled and semi-skilled indentured servants were displaced in favor of the massive enslavement of African women, men, and children.  Hundreds of millions lost their lives.

What this meant for Black women and their families was violent and complete separation from their lives, countries, people, culture, and language during their prime years.  "Slave buyers preferred their victims between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five, and preferably in the early twenties; the sex ratio being about two men to one woman," (Rodney 1982: 96).  They took their time to select those who had already survived smallpox, which at that time was one of the world's great killers[5].  The focus on youth and health was to ensure a viable population of enslaved workers that would be ready and able to work and reproduce.

For Black women in the North (which were few), the only work available was domestic service for white families[6].  Yet for the overwhelming majority of Black women who were concentrated in the South, there were no options: Black women, as well as their children, were confined to wholesale perpetual enslavement to produce goods for a global market[7].

The peculiar configuration of enforced labor and sexual relations under slavery converged most dramatically where the two forms of social domination (men over women and white over black) overlapped - that is, in the experiences of enslaved women - and reflected traditional white notions of womanhood combined with profit-making considerations that were unique to the plantation economy.

Enslaved African women, men, and children labored side by side in fields, houses, and mines, being forced to contribute to the economic, political, and social development of what would later be called the United States.  Regardless of pregnancy status, age, and infirmity, black women worked.  They were physically, emotionally, and sexually brutalized within hostile living and work environments.  Except for their ability to reproduce more enslaved children (especially when the international transportation of enslaved Blacks officially halted in Europe in the early 1800s) and satisfy the perverse sexual cravings of white men, black women could have been genderless, as they were forced to work in the fields just as hard as their African men.  Smuggling, raping, breeding, stealing and selling children, and molestation of African women and their offspring were standard operating procedures for whites and Arabs for hundreds of years.

Black women and girls were victims of sexual, verbal and physical abuse, rape, sodomy, torture, and other barbarous mistreatment by white men, women and children.  When not tending physical wounds of themselves and the other enslaved African people with whom they created family bonds, they tended the wounds of the heart caused by lifetimes of abuse and torture and the experience of losing loved ones over and over and over again: children snatched from the arms of crying mothers to be sold; babies beat out of the wombs of young women; women, men and children being worked to death...such short lives, broken bones, broken hearts, such a waste of human potential and life. 

Under the system of enslavement, Black women's role in the production process was absolute; from sun up to sun down, their labor, bodies, and sexuality were commodified, expropriated and exploited for profit.  Their labor was valued and hyper-exploited from early in the morning to late in the evening.  Their wombs were highly valued on the market, sometimes more so than their own labor power, because of the potential they possessed - in the early 19^th century, a woman who had given birth at least once on her lifetime was more valuable on the market than one who had never given birth at all[8].   

In the early 19^th century, enslavement-based agricultural production was declining, however temporarily the invention of the cotton gin revived it.  The cotton gin created a huge demand for cotton, which required a large labor force to pick it (the mechanical cotton picker had not yet been developed).  The enslavement of African people roared back to life, with a new twist-a focus on breeding.  For Black women, this meant that in addition to being worked to death in the fields, there was the added component of baby-maker.  Thus not only did white men rape and sodomize Black women and girls, but Black men were inserted into the equation.  White enslavers would instruct large, muscular men (considered good workers) to rape young women and girls so that they would become pregnant. 

Black women had no peace during this period of intense brutality.  At the bottom, mistreated and cheated daily, defenseless, innocent---young girls cried out for help; yet no one answered, no gods stopped it, no saviors, no one stepped in, no one came.  The tears, the blood, the powerlessness...generations of girls and women survived, but passed along the pain to their daughters and maintained the silence with their husbands, brothers, and fathers; men who en masse did little to protect them.  As a result, defense must be universal, every woman, every child, every man.  It starts within the very soul of a human being, the very fiber of one's being, the very essence of life and living.  It says that Black life is just as valuable as any other population's life.  It should be defended.  African woman trampled by triple oppression (race, gender, and class) must lead themselves.  Never again follow.  Always stand beside men, but never again behind.  The lessons of history require this.  Justice demands this. 

[1] Williams, E. 1944. Capitalism & Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

[2] Rodney, Walter. 1982. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Washington, DC: Howard University Press.

[3]Although mercantilism had already emerged in England, it was not yet developed enough to be fully transplanted in the colonies.  According to Jones, around the early 17^th century "[t]he technical level of production of seventeenth-century Europeans was probably not very much more developed than in Saxon times, although, compared with the Native Americans, the successful adoption of arable farming as the universal basis of life greatly raised the productivity of the land and the population it could support...The trans-Atlantic migrants were often farmers; those who were not had to turn to farming - they did so gladly enough where land was plentiful" (1996: 97). 

[4]Galenson, D. 1996. "The Settlement and Growth of the Colonies: Population, Labor, and Economic Development." in The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. Volume 1, The Colonial Era, edited by S. E. a. R. Gallman. New York: Cambridge University Press.

[5] Diamond, Jared. 1997. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

[6] Jones, Jacqueline. 1985. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present. New York: Vintage Books.

[7] Davis, Angela. 1983. Women, Race, and Class. New York: Vintage Books.

[8] Giddings, Paula. 1984. When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America. New York: Bantam Books.